Controlling Your Own Destiny

Vision and mission statements can help you build influence in the workplace, but crafting them is often difficult. This month's and next month's columns offer practical advice on how to create or revise your own statements.

The first thing to do is to stop thinking of "vision" and "mission" as interchangeable words. James Collins and Jerry Porras, the authors of "Organizational Vision and Visionary Organizations" (California Management Review, fall 1991), make a clear distinction between the two.

A vision, they contend, is a guiding philosophy of fundamental motivating assumptions, defining the core values and beliefs that drive the organization. It is broad, fundamental, inspirational, and enduring, and it "grabs the soul." A vision statement will still be relevant and applicable 100 years from now. Rather than describe what an organization currently does, it defines its perpetual purpose. A classic example is CEO Steve Jobs's vision for Apple Computer: "To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind." No matter how technology changes, the vision of what Apple is will remain the same.

A mission, on the other hand, is a tangible image that focuses attention on something currently worthwhile. It defines a clear and compelling goal that serves to unify employee efforts. As Collins and Porras put it, "It is crisp, clear, engaging—it reaches out and grabs people in the gut. People 'get it' right away; it requires little or no explanation. A mission has a finish line and a specific time frame for its achievement. A good mission is risky, falling in the gray area where reason says, 'This is unreasonable,' and intuition says, 'but we believe that we can do it nonetheless.'" A good example of a mission statement is President Kennedy's push for America's space program in 1961: "I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."

Why is this important for libraries? In theory, a school district's every activity is supposed to flow from and support its vision or mission statement, just as every school's activities are supposed to reinforce its own vision, nested in the broader context of the district's vision. In turn, your library's statement is supposed to provide the rationale for what you do within the context of your district and school.

Try this test: Can you recite your library's vision or mission statement from memory? How about your district's or school's? Don't feel bad if you failed. Research shows that most people can't recite them. But if you don't know what your vision or mission is, how will you be able to accomplish it?

A vision statement isn't really designed to serve an evaluative function except in the most holistic sense. But a mission statement by its nature is a framework for evaluation. There's a bottom line to it. Why is that important? Because in any worthwhile evaluation, how much you exceed or fall short of your target is the measure of your performance.

Vision and mission statements apply only to the organization and to the activities of its members. They define no one else's purpose or behavior. They assign commitment and responsibility to organizational members, not to clients and patrons—and that's a positive thing. Measuring your success by how others outside your organization behave is an invitation to failure. By creating your own vision or mission statement you can avoid the trap of having others outside assess your performance. You can't control or measure what others do, so you absolutely should not take responsibility for it. Are you prepared to define yourself and your program as failures if they don't meet outside criteria? I'm not.

Stay tuned.