The Single Biggest Mistake Made by Companies and Individuals when Defining Their Success

This has made earth shaking differences in companies and was the game changer, for me individually…

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Getting it right can make all the difference.

Most will argue that what we are about to address is “just a matter of definition and semantics, not worth our time”. It is that argument that has led to many organizational and personal failures.

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Late in the last century, companies and organizations quickly grasped the need for “mission” and “purpose” statements. Interestingly, the need for personal mission statements became yet another trend. As a result, I visit numerous companies and organizations where the mission statement is publicly posted and proudly recited to me during the first few minutes of my arrival. I also meet numerous individuals for coaching and mentoring sessions that can tell me their mission, but when I ask them to tell me their purpose, they look at me with confusion.

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Decades ago, perhaps because of perusing a thesaurus, I came upon the use of the words mission and purpose interchangeably. This threw up a proverbial “red flag”. As a result, I dug deeper into both the actual meaning of the words, and how companies and individuals interpreted them. My discovery was that they are not the same even though they are thought to be interchangeable. This leads us to the core of this article and the fact that the use of one over the other is often the root cause of frustration, mediocrity, and at worse, failure. Understanding the difference and the sequential interdependency of mission and purpose is a critical element in the success equation.

Chicken or Egg?

As we noted earlier, a few decades ago, there was a concerted effort across industry to develop mission statements. Part of the effort to “missionize” organizations was that the word mission was appealing. As a result, any company that desired to be part of the “in crowd” drafted and implemented mission statements. Many of these statements were lofty. Others were so general that they were inactionable. This led me to question the value of them. Putting on my philosopher’s hat, I set out to clearly define and understand the real meaning of both mission and purpose to see if these two words were interchangeable. One could say that I went on a mission to understand mission. Therein lies the first epiphany I had related to missions. A mission is a task with a clearly defined beginning and end. For example, a war is fought on purpose and not as a single mission, but a series of missions with specific objectives set on a specific purpose or objective or goal.

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It was from that point that the meaning of purpose became distinct and clear. Purpose is a generalized statement of value. Why am I doing what I am doing? My purpose is to be a teacher, coach, and mentor. Fulfillment of my purpose is obtained through various missions, such as a professor of a class, teaching philosophy, or psychology. Another mission could be mentoring a business leader. Another could be teaching statistics or Six Sigma or Lean.

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It became apparent that it was important for me to clearly define my value through my purpose first and then, align my missions to that purpose statement. Does it matter what you call your driving statement? Can one use the words mission and purpose interchangeably? I would say that one could use one or the other, but it is important to recognize that two specific definitions are needed and that one is a subset of the other. In this context, the proverbial, “what comes first, the chicken or the egg?” question has an answer! Purpose comes first and missions come after.

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Starting with Purpose

My preference, which has been “time tested”, is to build processes from the “output” backwards. As a result, I took time to ensure that my purpose was clearly defined. It is important to note that one may have numerous purposes each related to the roles I am expected to be during my life. This seems daunting, but one must realize that they serve a purpose within a family, and they may also have a specific career purpose and many others. We do not need to belabor this point. What is important is to look at oneself in their entirety. As a result my coaching sessions often began with he question, “What is your purpose?” to which the response was, “What do you mean?”

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The same holds true for a company or organization. When I founded my company, The Continuous Improvement Institute (The Cii), the first question I answered was, “What value will the Cii provide to its clients?” As I worked with numerous companies and organizations, I made it a habit to ask the same question. The response was their mission statement which sounded nice, but seldom had any alignment to the true value that they provided.

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The Mission Continues ??

After I created my Purpose statements, I was able to better prioritize my life. If I was at work, my purpose was to teach, or engineer. If I were at home, my “husband/father purpose statement took priority. Interestingly, effective prioritization requires focus and that was found when I began describing my activities as missions. At first, I would stop during an activity to “verbalize” what I was doing and then check to see if it aligned with and supported my “active purpose”. If my activity did not align and support, I questioned the value of it relative to my overall success. Over time my use of missions became automatic to the point that before acting, I assessed its relation and value. This allowed me to focus and to remove unneeded activities from my life.

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?Applying this routine to a company or organization was easy because it was the same! Every major activity and project were given a mission name and a statement (clear definition). It was then aligned with the purpose statement. Its value and priority, which in the past was often open to discussion, became apparent.

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Creating Purpose and Mission Statements that Makes a Difference

I realized, early in my ‘Purpose and Mission Development Mission” (intentionally redundant) that if it were left to the individual or a company without guidance, they would revert to the way it had always been done and there would be no progress.

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Using my personal experience, and what I learned from successes and failures, I developed guidelines for the development of effective purpose and mission statements. An early discovery was that purpose statements needed to be adjective-free. When adjectives are inserted into a purpose statement, they become a quality or assessment statement. This generated the first rule of many:

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Purpose statements cannot contain adjectives or adverbs but should just clearly describe the activity of value.

An example could be, “My purpose is to build bicycles”. This is brief, and to the point. The statement could be expanded to, “I build bicycles for trail riders”. The more specific that the purpose statement is, the better. ?If I was part of a company that built trail bikes, the company’s purpose would be, “We build bicycles for trail riders”. A mission could be, “To build the trail bikes and deliver them to our customers within 48 hours of their order.” The astute have noticed that the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Quality requirements are not present in the purpose statement but found in the mission statements. This is a powerful distinction that supports continuous assessment and improvement and leads to success.

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Purpose and missions should be the roadmap the leads to success. Success occurs when the purpose is continually fulfilled through the missions performed. Many believe that success is a single point; often referred to as the destination. When purpose and missions are developed and used properly, the journey and the destination are one in the same. If you are looking as an individual or as a company to put purpose and missions in the proper order visit our website at TheCii.com.