Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash. — Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash.

Brand purpose is supposedly more of a thing than ever, meaning it’s time for that old exercise where organizations struggle to figure out what they stand for and how to communicate it to their constituents.

This exercise inevitably comes back to the organization’s mission statement, which inevitably leads to someone asking, “Why does our mission statement suck?”

The answer is that your mission statement sucks because it couldn’t do anything else but suck. It’s a bunch of platitudes written by a committee; how could that possibly serve as a blueprint for action?

Here’s the tragic part: A properly crafted mission statement as part of a properly crafted mission-vision-values suite can do just about everything for an organization:

Determine its product line and its selling strategy;
Lay out its marketing; and
Help it attract new employees and new customers.

But, as I just said, all mission statements suck, so too bad about that.

Wait: All mission statements do not suck. Some actually do all this heavy lifting. I know because I’ve seen it in action.

I was privileged to work for Delta Dental of Wisconsin, the state’s largest dental insurer, and a company whose mission statement – “to improve the oral health of all Wisconsin residents,” give or take a few words – has been pretty much unchanged since the day I started.

Delta Dental might have the perfect mission statement – super-simple, super-clear, and super-actionable.

And it works. Let me show you how.

First, let’s look at how Delta Dental improves the oral health of Wisconsin residents.

Delta Dental improves people’s access to dental care through dentist networks and ongoing programs to keep an appropriate number of dentists in the state;
Delta Dental offers dental benefits that let many employees get the important preventive dental care they need at no out-of-pocket cost;
Delta Dental supports many initiatives around the state focused on the oral health of school-age children and lower-income residents; and
Delta Dental publicizes the importance of taking care of your teeth, especially for people with chronic health conditions like diabetes.

And now, let’s look at the business manifestations of that mission statement.

Delta Dental offers a wide variety of products designed so organizations of just about any size, and people of just about any income, can have important dental benefits;
Delta Dental has a cohesive, long-tenured workforce that buys into the mission and fosters a culture of service to customers and the broader community; and
Delta Dental has a dominant market-share position among dental insurers in Wisconsin.

You can argue that the last two points have nothing to do with Delta Dental’s mission, but I saw good people come to the organization because they wanted to be affiliated with a company that makes a difference, and I saw them reflect their own dedication to the mission to potential customers, who bought in as well.

If Delta Dental didn’t have the mission, and didn’t embody the mission, it couldn’t have the products, the people, or the customers. I believe it because I witnessed it.

I also witnessed a different company struggle for five years to create a mission statement, and stumble around on the business side before being absorbed by a much larger organization … with a well-defined mission statement.

So what’s the secret sauce? How can one company have a great mission statement and business success, while another company is doomed to wander in the wilderness?

I can’t speak for every organization, but here’s my recipe for creating a mission statement that can turbocharge your entire organization and provide the meaning that people inside and outside are yearning for.

Photo by David Iskander on Unsplash. — Photo by David Iskander on Unsplash.

Find The Person Who Knows.

Like so many things corporate, an effective mission statement starts at the top.

Basically, some higher-up needs to have a clear, dispassionate idea of why you exist. It may be to feed the hungry and give shelter to the homeless. It may be to buy other companies to make more money. It just has to be something.

That clear, dispassionate idea should also be a little aspirational. It’s okay for your mission statement to be a stretch goal. After all, Delta Dental doesn’t improve the oral health of all Wisconsin residents, though it wants to.

Whatever the case, you need to find the individual who knows why you exist, and you need to get that kernel of information out of them.

This is easy with a Delta Dental, where everyone knew who the Keeper of the Mission was. However, I’ve been at places where the Keeper of the Mission couldn’t or wouldn’t give a straight answer, preferring empty platitudes to something you could build an organization around.

You still need to find that person and drill down to the real answer, because if you don’t and create a mission statement anyway, your mission statement will eventually come back around to them and be shot down, because it doesn’t align with what’s in their head.

Remember Brand Purpose.

More and more people are evaluating a brand based on what it actually does – not what it says it’s going to do.

For brands with a strong mission (and vision and values), it’s a lot easier to do the right thing because you’ve already laid out what the right thing is.

If you don’t have a great mission statement, or are in the process of creating one, it can be helpful to reverse the process and ask: What are people expecting of your brand?

The people aren’t always right, but thousands of consumers (or even scores of customers) saying the same thing about your brand is probably a better barometer than what your VP of finance thinks.

I was involved with a brand where the customer’s expectation was a fantastic customer experience combined with global philanthropy, and the organization could not or would not dedicate itself to that mission. It didn’t end well.

Photo by Casey Allen on Unsplash. — Photo by Casey Allen on Unsplash.

For God’s Sake, Don’t Entrust It To A Committee.

It’s fine if the crafting of a mission statement is a group thing. But it shouldn’t be a committee thing.

You can bring together some people on an ad-hoc basis. You can gauge customer sentiment and gather feedback from different departments. You can throw three or four marketing people in a room and have them sift through things.

However, the second you form a committee you’ve consigned yourself to bland, ineffectual statements and chronic misuse and overuse of the word “solutions.”

(For the last time: Solutions solve problems. If you don’t define problems you can’t have solutions.)

The reflex reaction to someone saying, “We need a better mission statement,” is someone else saying, “Let’s form a committee.” Don’t give in. Fight that reflex to your last breath.

Put Someone In Charge.

One of the big problems with mission statements by committee is that no one wants to head up the project. The preference is to get everyone in a conference room (or get everyone their own conference room) and have them remain perfectly still until a mission statement forms in their collective consciousness.

This is an updated version of the older process, which used a Ouija board and produced ectoplasm as a side effect.

No. You need to find the best editor in your organization, put them in charge of the process, and give them the power to cut out every extraneous word.

If no one undercuts them (a very big if) they’ll produce something concise that will probably annoy every faction in the organization … to the betterment of all.

Consider How It Will Impact Your Business.

I’ve worked with organizations that say there’s no way a mission statement can change the way they do business. I say that’s poppycock.

Let’s take a company that makes industrial air filters. It has a mission statement – something along the lines of, “Our mission is to provide high-quality filtration solutions to process-driven organizations around the world,” because that’s the sort of empty-headed mission statement industrial-air-filter companies come up with when left to their own devices.

What can you conclude about this company from this statement, other than it’s an incredibly dull place to work?

It may or may not actually make filters, depending on how you define “filtration solutions”; and
It likes to work with similarly dull-minded organizations, which probably doesn’t restrict its market, but still.

However, even this moribund company can create a dynamic, actionable mission statement – something like, “Our mission is to empower our employees to collaborate with customers on high-quality filtration products that protect and improve the environment.”

Think about what a statement like that does.

It puts employees first, which is what the company should be doing all along.
It commits the organization to giving its employees the power to make decisions on its behalf.
It lays the groundwork for a customer-centered product-development process and an overall dedication to customer experience.
It says the company makes things, which is, like, what it actually does.
It states the company’s commitment to the environment.

Look at who and what it identifies as the key areas of focus:

Our employees.
Our customers.
The environment.

And note the things it doesn’t say:

It doesn’t say “solutions.”
It doesn’t say, “We’re going to pay our employees more,” though that’s a likely long-term outcome.
It doesn’t commit the company to millions of dollars in philanthropy, though it’s certainly welcome to donate money to worthy causes.

If you don’t think you could build a business around a mission statement like this, you’re crazy.

So why don’t more organizations have mission statements like this?

They don’t trust their employees to make good decisions on behalf of the organization. To which I reply, why’d you hire them then?
They don’t want to pay their employees more. I worked for an organization that didn’t want to pay its $10-an-hour employees $12 an hour to do a job that they should have been paying them $20 an hour to do. Employee turnover was 120%, and I calculated that with acquisition costs and signing bonuses and overtime and such the organization was paying $45-$75 a hour in actual costs for every $10-an-hour employee they hired. In other words, they could have cut labor costs 50% to 75% by doubling the wages of the people who were already working there. I think about that every time management balks at a 5% wage hike for their frontline workers.
They don’t want to do what their customers want. It’s so much easier for an organization to try to make customers do what the organization wants than to really cater to customers’ needs. Here’s the thing, though: the most successful organizations give customers what they want, and figure out how to make it work on their end.

If You Really Believe In It, Don’t Test It.

Listen, if you have a mission statement that you think embodies your organization and sets it up for the future and defines brand purpose, don’t get all namby-pamby and do a bunch of tests to see what people think. Roll with it!

As Albin so memorably sings in the musical version of La Cage Aux Folles, “It's my world that I want to have a little pride in/My world and it's not a place I have to hide in/Life's not worth a damn till you can say/Hey world I am what I am.”

Rock on.

Go Out And Live It.

There’s only one thing left to do after all this: Be who you are. Live out your mission statement. Have a purpose and stick to it.

Are there more expedient things you could do? Absolutely. Are there better things? Probably not.

The world is waiting for your organization to say, “I am what I am.” What are you waiting for?

Embrace Brand Purpose – With These Seven Tips For Writing A Mission Statement That Doesn't Suck