8 ways your mission can serve you
Mission statements in organizations can feel like a rite of passage or obligation. We know we need it when we start a project or organization. When we think of it as a requirement though, we often check it off on our to-do list and forget about it.
Our attachment and connection to the mission can often stop there too:
We can lose our sense of why we are there. We forget why we made certain decisions. We burnout. We lose touch with those we serve. We become less efficient and effective.
Missions statements take a lot of work - both to create and to maintain. To create it, we are asked to probe deeply and answer hard questions we don’t want to answer or don’t have answers to. Questions like: Why are we here? Who do we serve? Why do they need us?
Once we generate our mission, it is not the end - it’s merely the beginning. We have to maintain it, watering and tending to it over time like with a plant. We have to guide it and fine tune it so we can uphold it with integrity.
Along the way, we will be both validated and challenged. And that is a good thing.
Actively engaging with our mission statements over time can be beneficial for us.
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Here are 8 ways your mission can work in your favor:
1. Increase your confidence (as individual and as organization) - Missions help you articulate your why and what you stand for more clearly and consistently. When what we say is aligned with what we believe, we feel great. That boosts our confidence in ourselves and in our work. This reflects onto those we work with too: musicians feel more comfortable and motivated when they can see a conductor’s why or composer's why when it is presented with confident consistency.
2. Strengthen your credibility and trust - Missions motivate you to do what you say you're going to do. It holds you accountable because you have clarity about what you’re doing in the game. Credibility leads to trust that leads to innovation and movement forward. When your musicians trust you, they are more open to trying new things. Trust allows you the safety to begin growing.
3. Help you set goals and achieve them - We are most productive and effective as people and organizations when we follow Stephen Covey’s advice to "begin with the end in mind." Missions give us a framework on which to attach our big and small goals, and they help us evaluate how we are doing along the way. Are we really accomplishing what we said we would, or did we go on a tangent? Are our goals really related to our mission? Are we moving forward or getting stuck? Missions can also help us pinpoint “how will we know when we are done?” to ensure we set that as a goal and achieve it.
4. Mobilize your people toward a cause - Unifying a group of people around a mission is an effective and genuine way to get people fired up and feel camaraderie. It increases collaboration between group members and prevents isolation when we know we are all fighting for the same cause. We stop competing against one another and stop withholding information, but rather fight against a common enemy (which can be a competitor or simply an injustice or a problem to be solved).
5. Combat burnout - Liz Wiseman said, “We burnout not because we’re doing too much work, but because we are having too little impact.” Even the best, most motivated people can feel burnout. Missions remind us of the impact we are making and help us see it in front of us. If we use missions to identify relevant milestones and goals, we would be able to use the visibility of that impact to combat burnout. We all want to know that our work is making a difference, even if it’s baby steps. When times are tough, we can support ourselves by leveraging our mission to give us intrinsic motivation and boost morale.
6. Clarify your interaction with your audience - We often market to everyone, hoping everyone will come to our concerts. It actually dilutes our message and undermines our outreach efforts. We can use missions to constantly challenge us to think deeply about who our work is for and, equally important, who it is not for. Once we can gain clarity about that, our marketing and audience engagement efforts can be run through that filter. It helps us be both more targeted in who we want to help and more creative in how we help them.
7. Improve your hiring and lower turnover - With a clear mission to stand behind, we can get the right people on the bus and we can keep them on it, even when times get rough. We can use a mission intentionally in hiring processes. Highlight purpose and values in job postings to attract musicians who resonate, who desire to fight the same fight. Ask meaningful questions in interviews to explore what they care about and what their passion projects are. Once we form a tribe of like-minded people, we stick together.
8. Help you make hard decisions - When we can articulate why we are doing the work, we have a better chance of making decisions that will further our mission, especially when they are hard decisions. We can feel more confident about making choices that are controversial because they align with the fight we are in, the change we seek to make, and the way we promise to help our people. Missions help us identify our values that make hard decisions feel right.
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In our leadership and organizational journeys, we will have prosperous times and tough times.
During those times, our mission can be leveraged to validate us, challenge us, help us grow, and reveal to us the impact we are having.
Consider which of the above ways your mission is serving you.
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