If Your Mission Statement Doesn't Help You Choose, What Is It For?

Imagine a university with the following mission statement:

Our mission is to provide a student-centered educational experience that advances academic excellence, innovation, inclusion, research, leadership, career readiness, community engagement, and service. We empower lifelong learners to address local and global challenges and contribute to a more just and sustainable future.

I made that up, but it probably sounds familiar.

Now imagine the university has an extra $1 million to spend. It could hire faculty and reduce class sizes, support more research, increase financial aid, start a new professional program, expand career services, or invest more heavily in community engagement. Which should it choose?

The mission statement provides a reasonable argument for all of them. That also means it provides little guidance about which one should take priority.

Organizations often treat mission statements as communications exercises. The language should sound inspiring, reflect what the organization values, and give the various people involved in drafting it something they can support. But a mission statement should do more than sound good. It should say something about what an organization is fundamentally there to do. If it has any strategic value, it should make some choices easier and others harder.

Management scholars Andrew Campbell and Sally Yeung made a version of this argument decades ago, connecting mission to an organization’s purpose, strategy, values, and behavior. Their framework treated mission not simply as a statement to be polished, but as a way of connecting what an organization says it is for to what it actually does.

One reason that connection gets lost is that organizations often ask one statement to do too many jobs.

There is no universal agreement about exactly where mission ends and purpose, vision, or values begin. But the concepts generally address different questions. Why do we exist? What are we here to do? What are we trying to become? How should we behave?

It helps to keep those questions separate because not everything an organization cares about needs to appear in its mission. Integrity may be a value. Becoming a leader in a particular market may be a vision. A broader explanation of why the organization exists may be its purpose. If you fold all those ideas into the mission, it can become a summary of everything the organization believes, values, and hopes to accomplish.

The hard-choice test

One way to judge a mission statement is to put it next to an actual tradeoff. For example:

A university says it values personalized education and growth. Then what happens when growth means larger classes?

The mission statement highlights undergraduate teaching and research excellence. So what happens when the same dollar could support smaller classes or more faculty research?

Both career preparation and the liberal arts are listed as priorities. What if enrollment is growing in narrowly occupational programs while traditional liberal arts programs struggle?

A mission statement certainly cannot answer those questions by itself. Leadership still requires (and, I believe, will always require) judgment. But the statement ought to provide some guidance about what should carry more weight when worthwhile goals conflict. If every option can be justified equally well by appealing to the mission, the mission statement is not accomplishing much.

In looking for counterexamples, I started with a few institutions I know well. Two of my alma maters, Yale University and Bowdoin College, happen to have mission statements that illustrate the point in different ways.

Yale’s core mission is remarkably short:

“Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”

Notice it does not try to include everything Yale cares about. Instead, it answers a simpler question about what Yale is fundamentally here to do. That gives the university some basis for asking whether a new activity belongs near the center of what it does.

Bowdoin takes a more specific approach. Its mission calls for an “intense full-time education” of students of “uncommon promise” in a “four-year course of study and residence” leading to a liberal arts degree.

Those words can guide decision making in clear ways. For example, if Bowdoin found a large market for fully online, part-time professional certificates, that might be a perfectly legitimate opportunity. But it would be hard to describe it as central to the institution Bowdoin says it is.

That does not mean Bowdoin should never change. It means the mission raises a useful question. Would this opportunity extend what Bowdoin exists to do, or would it start turning Bowdoin into a different kind of institution?

Yale and Bowdoin are admittedly unusual examples. Both are wealthy, highly selective institutions with strong reputations and more freedom than most colleges to turn down opportunities. That makes focus easier. The basic point does not depend on having Yale’s endowment, though. An institution with fewer resources typically has even less room to pursue every worthwhile opportunity that comes along. As money and attention become less plentiful, choices and tradeoffs become more important.

How mission statements become lists

One of the main reasons weak mission statements are so common is that they can emerge easily from perfectly reasonable drafting processes. A task force is formed, and in the first meeting someone says that teaching needs to be there. A second person points out that research matters too. Career preparation belongs somewhere. So does the liberal arts tradition. Community engagement is important. Nobody wants to leave out inclusion or innovation. Surely the institution believes in excellence. Then come leadership, service, lifelong learning, and preparing students for an uncertain future.

Each addition makes sense and is easy to justify, while subtracting something is more difficult. Who wants to be the person arguing that innovation should come out? Or community engagement? Or excellence? So the statement grows. The process rewards inclusion. Every constituency gets something it cares about into the statement, and almost nobody has a reason to object to the finished product. That may make the statement easier to approve, but it can also make it much less useful when the organization has to decide what actually matters most.

The problem is not unique to universities. A business can promise low prices, exceptional quality, personalized service, innovation, sustainability, rapid growth, and great jobs for employees. A nonprofit can promise broad reach, deep impact, responsiveness to every constituency, and careful stewardship of resources. All are worthwhile, but they also pull organizations in different directions.

Mission and strategy

At its core, strategy captures the choices an organization makes about how it will pursue its aims. It requires deciding where to focus, what to invest in, and what not to do. A mission can give those choices a basis by helping an organization decide which opportunities fit, which tradeoffs it is willing to accept, and which attractive possibilities it should decline.

Yet many organizations resist saying that some worthwhile things matter more than others. The mission says everything matters, and the strategic plan follows suit with six priorities, twenty objectives, and dozens of initiatives.

Research suggests that simply having a mission statement does not accomplish much by itself. A meta-analysis of roughly two decades of studies found only a modest relationship between mission statements and organizational performance. In strategic terms, a mission statement only becomes consequential when it affects decisions. Does it shape investments? Influence which opportunities get pursued? Help explain why the organization is saying no to something attractive? Affect what gets protected when resources are tight?

One simple test is to take a phrase in the mission statement and ask what organizational decision could conceivably be different because those words are there. If the answer is none, why are they there?

Organizations can care about many things. They cannot prioritize all of them equally. The real test of a mission statement comes when there are more worthwhile opportunities than money, time, or attention. Its job is not to record everything the organization values. It is to help clarify what matters most when choices have to be made.