Over the years, I’ve been asked to facilitate a lot of companies’ retreats, where a great deal of mission statement creation or updating takes place. The more time passes, the more I find mission statement generating a waste of time. I’m ashamed to have been an instrument in the creation of many of them.
It’s not that I think the concept itself is worthless. It’s that most mission statements I’ve seen–both those I’ve facilitated the creation of and those I’ve wandered by–are watered down, boring, even cryptic. They say a lot about nothing. They’re watered down because the people writing them mistake compromise for collaboration. As a result, it’s pretty darn hard to rally behind most of them.
I decline the request for most of this kind of work these days, unless the organization is ready to do some startling, truly creative and risky work and is willing to creatively engage the kind of important conversations necessary for a great mission statement.
And so I’m delighted that I can now refer organizations I’m declining to a website that can simply generate their mission statement for them. No money, no time, just the click of a button. The mission statements generated are at least as irrelevant as a lot of the ones I see out there. Have some fun at the Dilbert.com Mission Statement Generator.
Having just read the blog post on anchoring, I had to chuckle thinking about how many people form a mission statement, based on a vague idea that it is some kind of anchoring.
I certainly have worked for organizations that have a meaningless but confusing mission statement. Perhaps learning about anchoring before they move on to mission statements would be helpful…
My other work place favorite list, is a list of “core competencies” required (of existing employees). what is anyone supposed to do about that? While I understand the words/concepts listed, I question the efficacy of employer required self-development.
Stephanie, thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts.
I really like your idea that great mission statements should be like anchors. I agree. Now if more could actually pull that off…
Core competencies have been in higher ed for years, so I wonder if organizations adopted them from that arena. It seems to me that the idea is a sound one for professional development, and suspect that the problem may be less the idea than the way it’s implemented. Even in higher ed I sometimes see courses with competencies that are so vague that no one could possibly measure a student’s success with achieving that competency. Is that what you’re seeing in the core competencies you’re talking about?