A leader’s first responsibility is to set the direction: where the business is going, how it plans to get there, and what has to happen next. The first two are questions of destination and route. The third is a question of proof, whether the plan is specific enough to fail.

 

Most leadership teams have language for the first two. A vision statement answers what the world looks like once the organization succeeds. Habitat for Humanity’s is a single sentence: “A world where everyone has a decent place to live.” A mission statement answers how the organization intends to get there. Habitat’s: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities and hope.” Between the two, a team has a destination and a route. (I’ve written a fuller breakdown of how to optimize vision and mission statements, here.)

 

What neither one answers is what has to be true by when. A vision statement can survive for decades without anyone checking on it. A public-facing mission statement can be recited every year at the annual gathering and never once be tested against a number. That’s not a flaw in either document. It’s simply not the job of public-facing statements to reveal internal benchmarks. For that, a leadership team needs a third document, one most have never written down.

 

I call it a Goal Statement. Elsewhere, Donald Miller calls the equivalent document a Mission Statement in his own framework. I use different language here on purpose, since I already use “mission statement” for the public-facing document above, and a leadership team confusing the two is exactly the kind of muddle this whole exercise is meant to prevent.

 

An effective internal-facing Goal Statement is composed of three parts: three economic objectives, a deadline, and a reason the objectives matter. Miller’s formula for stringing them together is simple: we will accomplish X by Y because of Z.

 

Why limit oneself to three economic objectives? A team can hold three specific priorities in mind at once and actually act on them. Hand a team more than that, and in practice they’ll act on none of them, since the brain treats an unranked list as permission to ignore all of it.

 

Why state a deadline? A goal with no end date doesn’t create urgency; it just sits there, technically true forever and useful to no one. The objectives need to be numeric, not aspirational, because a number is the only thing that can actually be missed. “We want to grow” can’t fail. By contrast, “We will serve thirty new clients by December 31” can fail, and that’s what makes it worth writing down.

 

Why state a reason the objectives matter? A number on its own can feel arbitrary; it could be any number, hit for no particular purpose. Yet, if you state the reason, the number stops being a quota handed down and starts being something the team has an actual stake in.

 

Here’s what this looks like for a company that employs young women who’ve aged out of the foster care system, training them to craft high-end jewelry and leather handbags: “We will train twelve new artisans, sell two thousand handcrafted pieces, and place our collection in ten new retail boutiques by December 31, because every young woman deserves an income of her own, and the chance to be known for something other than her case file.” Notice the objectives aren’t limited to revenue. Growth here means more women trained, not just more units sold, and the “because clause” ties directly back to the one detail that makes this company distinctive, that every piece is named by the woman who made it. A number without a reason is a quota. A number with one is a mission a team can actually own.

A vision statement, a mission statement, and a Goal Statement all matter, and each does something the other two can’t. With a vision statement, a leader points to the mountain his team needs to climb. With a mission statement, he shows them the path they’ll take to get there. And with a Goal Statement, he tells them exactly how far to walk before the next sunset, and how they’ll know when they’ve made it.

 

Vision, Mission, and goal statements are three instruments in a larger Cockpit. If you’d like help building yours, along with the rest of what a Small Business Flight Plan or Nonprofit Flight Plan puts in place, I’d welcome a conversation.