Breathing Life Into the Mission

You have a mission statement. Your team is excited, and everyone has rallied around it. Now what? What do you do with the mission? What are some practical steps?

Just allowing the mission statement to be a quote that hangs on the wall or appears in an annual employee survey isn’t healthy. It needs to live and breathe. The mission statement should seep from your pores—it is the very lifeblood of the organization.

How do you do that? How does it go from a piece of paper to something that has life?

First, you must own it. As the leader, everything rises and falls with you. For the mission to have life, you must give it life. Open every staff meeting by asking someone to say the mission. Ask the team how they fulfilled the mission within the last week. Ask for specific examples. Keep the mission front and center in your staff meetings.

Second, you can never talk about the mission enough. People are easily distracted and get off course quickly. Bring up the mission in conversations to guide your team back to true north. Instead of correcting the team and providing the solution, ask them, “What would the mission say we should do about this?” Give the mission freedom to guide next steps and provide correction.

Third, live under the ethic of the mission. At EAG, our mission is to create unparalleled experiences. That very statement creates a framework that guides our actions toward clients, team members, and our work. Before you fire off a hot-tempered email, step back and ask, “Will this create an unparalleled experience—at least one I want to be remembered for?” The mission should help us interact with each other with excellence and provide guardrails for the quality of work we produce. Give permission to the mission to do that in your organization.

Finally, the mission is going to make people uncomfortable—let it. The more the mission is alive within the organization, the more it will inspire some toward greatness and expose others’ unwillingness to pursue it. For those who bring passion and calling to their work, the mission will become their best friend. It will guide them and give purpose to their tasks. For the individual who sees their work as just a job and only shows up for a paycheck, the mission becomes an enemy. It challenges their mindset and urges them to be more. At times, the mission will win, and those people will grow. Other times, some will leave because the weight of the mission is simply too much to bear. But allow the mission to make people uncomfortable—your organization will be better because of it.

Take the mission seriously, and your team will take it seriously. Link the work of the team to the mission so they see its importance. But most of all, allow the mission to give purpose. As the leader, this falls to you. You can’t hand off the purpose of the organization to anyone else. The mission is yours. Allow it to make you a better leader. Allow it to make your organization a thriving one. Do that, and you’ll have an advantage over every competitor.

Intersecting life, luxury, and leadership,
Chris Adams

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