What do you do?

Seriously, when you come to work in the morning do you ever ask yourself, “why am I here?”

A lot of people go to church to answer this question, but for our purposes, giving it a little thought in the office can do wonders for you.

When you are making decisions about your business — such things as what jobs you want your employees to perform, what skills they need, how many people you have, how to spend your money — all of this should be designed to support your mission.

But what do we mean by “your mission?” Well, if you identified your firm’s vision, then that tells you what you want the world to look like. Your mission is what you do to get there. It is the main function that you perform, and everything your employees do should either advance that mission or support those who do.

Unlike vision statements, which should be involve more nouns than verbs, mission statement should be more “verby.” These are action statements, they say what you DO, not what you WANT. For example, let’s say you are in a public relations firm. Your vision statement might be something along the lines of “Our clients can walk into any room of their choosing and everyone there knows who they are.” Your mission, then, is to create that environment. Your mission statement could be something like “we use every available medium of communication to put our clients’ names in the forefront of the public’s mind,” which says you see your purpose as creating public familiarity with your clients. Or maybe, “we tout our clients’ successes in public while allowing them to learn from their mistakes in private,” suggesting that your function is to promote the good news stories while keeping quiet those things that will hurt your clients’ reputations, so the public has good feelings about them.

Your mission statement should be specific enough to get you to your vision while being broad enough to encompass all you do. It does not need to identify every specific task performed in your company, but every specific task should fit within the broad outline you’ve described.

The most important outcome of defining your mission is that it gives your employees some focus. In a bureaucratic environment where the mission is pretty well understood — “we will do the same things tomorrow that we did yesterday” — it is easier for employees to absorb that focus by immersing themselves in the organizational culture. But when it comes to more creative enterprises, especially those in fast-paced, changing environments, your employees are going to be thrown into a mixing bowl at high speed and they will need some direction to keep them moving forward and avoid the blades of this really bad metaphor that I just decided I don’t like. OK, here’s the thing: you get a bunch of talented, free-thinking, creative people together and they will come up with great ideas that may have nothing to do with your business. Ten people could easily go in ten different directions if you do not have something that ties them together. That’s what a mission statement does for you.

It is easy to just write these quickly without any real thought, turning out something that sounds high-minded but is devoid of any real meaning. “Quality is Job #1” was a statement used by Ford Motor Company for many years — I’m not sure if they intended it to be their mission statement but it was on banners and everything, so maybe it was. But it did not give any direction to employees, except perhaps to say “don’t make mistakes,” but really, the mission of Ford isn’t to not make mistakes…it is to make money. So why not describe your mission in such a way as to help you get to that?

Something to keep in mind: if you are doing something, and you cannot figure out how it relates to your mission, then maybe, just maybe, you should not be doing it. If you come across something like that, and you are afraid to make a change and stop doing it, well, just accept that you are spending resources on something that doesn’t really matter, which translates into “wasting time and money.” That is probably not a good idea.

Understanding why you are here is important. Gaining that understanding is not always easy. But with a little thought you will find a lot of focus, and that will keep you moving ahead of your competitors, and also help your employees understand why, exactly, they should show up for work each day.