How to Set a Clear Vision and Mission for your Team

in this video i want to look at how to set a clear mission and vision for your team what's the number one question that small children ask all the time yeah it's why why is a search for meaning and it doesn't stop when we become adults it's just that we often internalize that dialogue if people are to be committed and motivated to do some work to contribute to your project then they have to have a good juicy because to justify that commitment they need a meaning for the work they're going to do and that's what

mission and vision give us mission and vision connect what we're doing day to day with what matters to us i think it can be enormously valuable for a project and certainly for any organization to have a mission statement and a vision statement i'm going to suggest to you a five-step process for developing a mission and vision this process will scale very nicely it will work for a project mission and vision or even a program or portfolio mission and vision it will even scale to developing a mission and vision for a new organization and at the

end of the video i'll give you my sense of what makes for good mission and vision statements step one in setting a clear vision and mission for your team is to gather the team together you need to set a meeting date and create a meeting for the team to get together and to discuss it and it's really important that you prepare for this meeting in fact better still find someone external to the team to facilitate the conversation and make sure they prepare well by understanding the context by getting to know your team members and yourself

and finding out the parameters within which they're working they will need to design a process for discussing what matters for evaluating ideas and for building a framework to hang the vision and mission from the second step is to work on a start point there are a few very simple questions that you need to ask of the team and to really understand deeply the different answers that arise and to start to build consensus about what aspects of those answers really matter to the team the first questions describe what the team aspires to achieve when you ask

the team what do you want you're really inquiring into their sense of what their mission is and when you ask the question where are you going you're really asking about their sense of vision and the next questions deepen your understanding whom do you serve asks questions about the people we're doing the project for and who will benefit from it and when we ask the really difficult question why are we doing this we're really inquiring into what the benefits are what the value is that will accrue from the project with this data gathering over we need

to craft some form of outline that will inspire the majority of your team and it's important at this third stage that you are not trying to please everybody you're not looking for some simple lowest common statement that everyone can easily buy into now it would be great if you can come up with a vision and a mission that everyone does endorse but don't do that at the cost of being suitably ambitious at this stage you are not looking for beautifully crafted sentences or paragraphs what you're looking for is some key phrases some pictures even some

diagrams some sketches some adjectives some nouns some words that really capture the essence of what your vision is and what your mission is the fourth stage is then to gain commitment to that and remember here you are gaining commitment to the ideas to the essence not to a specific set of words if you try to craft a mission statement or a vision statement with a large group of people it will be messy it will be ugly and it probably won't succeed you need to deputize a small group having gained the commitment to take away all

those ideas and to come up with draft versions that they can then test with the team subsequently and further refine and after that testing and refinement process when you do have your vision statements and your mission statement step five is to embed them you need to communicate those statements to the whole team and to a wider stakeholder community you need to publicize them and you need to make them present repeat them so that they start to embed themselves in people's minds of course you need to use them as your guiding light in the decisions that

you're going to make if they don't actually cause any consequences in the real world then it was a complete waste of time so what makes for good mission statements and good vision statements well this is a very subjective thing i know but for me the first thing is they have to be simple they have to pass what i call the seven year old test if your seven-year-old child doesn't really understand what they're talking about then yes smart intelligent adults may understand it but they won't understand it quickly they'll have to process it and make interpretations

of it and of course your interpretation my interpretation may be very different if it passes the seven-year-old test and a seven-year-old would understand what it's all about then likely it is simply enough that we all understand it in the same way and there's another thing i think is important about a vision statement in particular what is a vision statement if it doesn't conjure up a vision craft it in ways that conjure up images draw pictures in people's minds because that's what a vision is as far as you can within this make it short concise and

precise but more important than anything else it has to be ambitious it needs to be bold but it also needs to be grounded in reality particularly the mission statement the vision can take you some way into the future and therefore perhaps not as real as the solidity of your mission but make it bold make it ambitious and if everyone commits to it or the vast majority of your team commit to it then you've got something good [Music] please do give a thumbs up if you like this video there's loads more great project management content to

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