Developing a Mission and Vision Statement

At General Media Consulting, we believe that successful implementation begins with a solid foundation of stakeholder communication and involvement.  Of course, we are not unaware of the additional time and resources required to do things right the first time, but overall statistics reveal that it is worth it.  That is why the first step in developing a formal, written mission and vision statement is bringing a group of your primary stakeholders together.

The process of releasing creativity, processing a cloud of ideas and refining it into the useful center point of your organization requires professional facilitation.  That is where General Media Consulting comes in.  We oversee the process from an objective, professional level.  Our goal in this is to help you clearly say what you think and feel about what your company does and is focused on becoming.  The goal is to craft a message that offers a common ground that is easy to connect with and understand for as many people as possible.  The mission and vision statements are the starting point for all future goal setting and planning.

The group of stakeholders that are going to be contributing to the conversation are gathered.  We've introduced the overseer to facilitate the conversation.  Now we begin open share.  This is a form of brainstorming designed to look at a series of questions from various angles.  The goal is to get a well rounded look at the company and discover key words and themes.

The first question the group will wrestle with is, 'What does the company do?'  It seems simple enough; however, once we get into your company's products, services and the ins and outs of the work you do on a regular basis it can become a challenging exercise.  You may be surprised at how many different ideas people who work in close proximity to one another have concerning this.  Hence the importance of the exercise.

The next question General Media Consulting engages in with the group is, 'Who do you want to become?'  This is a forward looking question and should take into account future expectations concerning the industry and many other variables.  This discussion is going to give us the raw material we need for the vision statement.  This is going to help bring all the key stakeholders to a place of common understanding of the organization's desired destination.

The last round of discussions is vital.   Once the Open Share conversations are complete, General Media Consulting will enter into a time of professionally crafting formal written Mission and Vision statements.  We will present several versions of each based on the results of the Open Share. This is where General Media and your group of stakeholders, as a team, chooses a mission and vision statement and discusses the various ways that we can further clarify the statements.  This is an important part of the process.  We want the statements to be a simple and clear as possible.  Once a company sets its mission and vision statements in place, all future goals and plans will spring from these points of common understanding.  Most companies will go through their entire life-cycle without any significant change to these two statements.  Therefore, we want to help you do this right, then finalize the statements.