A mission statement is the articulation of what your firm stands for, describing your company’s unique reason for being and making it clear why anyone would want to do business with you and not your competitors.

Done right, a mission statement will guide your employees, help you decide how to best allocate resources and create shared values to turn your company into a competitive force. Unfortunately, too many firms do it wrong.

Here are three best practices in creating and implementing mission statements:

1) State what’s really important—and nothing else

The best mission statements clearly and vividly illustrate what a company does for customers and staff. Most missions fail at this, often because there’s too much or too little detail. Go too short, and you won't provide enough guidance. Go too long, and you’re likely to include details that won’t compel positive action while reducing anyone’s ability to memorize the mission.

The following mission statement of Seattle-based Salty’s Seafood Grills is a favourite of Chris Bart, president of Hamilton-based Corporate Missions Inc. and a professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business:

A legendary, unbridled passion for perfection. We dedicate ourselves to creating a truly outstanding service and entertainment business, recognized as a great restaurant company to do business with and a great place to work. We are an outstanding restaurant company. We exceed our guests' expectations through empowered people, guided by shared values and commitments. This requires: a consistent guest focus for our company, which all of our people understand and feel passionate about, recognizing that a happy guest is the cornerstone of our success; and an empowered restaurant organization which is both motivated and supported to satisfy guests to the fullest extent of our capabilities.

2) Enlist your employees

Your mission statement won’t succeed without employee buy-in—which is easier to get if they help you develop it. Have a small cross-section of employees write one, and ask them to send one or two draft versions to the entire staff to give them a chance to offer feedback on it. That turns it into their mission, not just the committee's or yours.

3) Let your mission statement permeate your business

Do you know your mission statement by heart? More importantly, do your employees? Only when a stakeholder is intimately familiar with a mission statement can they continuously act according to it. To make everyone familiar with your mission statement, try:

• referring to the statement in staff meetings;
• asking your managers to relate their plans and budgets to it;
• using it as the basis for training, recruitment, promotion, reward and disciplinary programs
• tracking progress against it using your management-information system.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and what gets rewarded gets done. It’s essential to measure your progress against your mission and reward staff for helping make it a reality.
- By Chris Bart

NEXT WEEK: Create your strategic plan.