How clear is your organization’s mission and vision statement?
Our reader poll today asks: How clear is your organization’s mission and vision statement?
– It’s crystal clear, simple and compelling: 43%
– It’s generally clear but could be better worded: 25%
– It’s full of meaningless buzzwords or we simply don’t have one: 21%
– It’s not clear and it’s hard to rally behind: 12%
Where are we going? About a third of you aren’t clear on where you’re going or why it’s a good place to go. Get your team in a room and discuss why your organization exists. Cut the buzzwords and speak in simple, compelling terms. Tell folks what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and why you’re better at it than your competitors. If you can lay all that out in a couple of sentences it will be much easier to galvanize and excite your organization to achieve your vision.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.
I do agree with the statistics as they are published, but I’d love to go a bit deeper & understand what the audience “understood” by “It’s crystal clear, simple and compelling”. Yes, that’s an important statement, but a more important factor is how they use this mission statement in their day-to-day activities. For example, how you do you apply the attributes of your WHY (Mission) statement in your decision making and or priority setting? Everyone has their own interpretation of what something means, and so I find it’s critical that a true story be told that exemplifies that they’re acting upon a mission statement in the same way it was intended to be lived.
Apologies for the repeat, but the same observation goes for the Vision statement. How quantifiable is it, and how does it impact the decisions made on a day-to-day basis, as well as the strategic decisions made less frequently.
I do agree with the results. It’s about the percentage of business’s that you can tell from the outside in has a clear vision due to their success. The lower two categories of 33% are obvious as a customer or client and seems about right. That means about 1/3 business have poor or no vision. Vision is so important!