Simple statements most sacred
Matt Pearl
The first year I was teaching in King City, I sat in a Community School Improvement Plan meeting where both school personnel and community members were gathered to discuss forward-thinking ideas for the school district.
The night of the meeting, I hated just about every second I spent in the R-I library. I remember one of the tasks in front of us was to formulate a mission statement for the district.
As a small-town pragmatist, mission statements are enough to get my eyes rolling. But I behaved myself that night, dug in, and pitched the wordiest, most eloquent version of what I believed should be our statement of purpose at R-I.
The man next to me had written a much more straightforward statement, one that essentially noted that our mission was to teach students the concepts and skills they needed.
It made me feel stupid when I looked at my academic, elitist, overworded monstrosity of a mission declaration. But the experience taught me something about mission statements:
We don’t state a mission to sound smart; we state a mission so that everyone involved is following the same basic plan.
Who is thriving today in the business world?
For the most part, we see the companies that know just what they’re doing and work to do that better than anyone else in the world. The same works for each of us as individuals.
Persons who know what they believes and stand by their core values with honesty and integrity will go further than the wishy-washy, turn- with-the-tide-folks.
A friend of mine was discussing this with me earlier this week: an institution without a sense of itself cannot grow — have you ever seen a tall tree without virtually immovable roots?
How can we attain success without fitst deciding what we’re doing?
I realize looking back to that CSIP meeting that my problem was not that I wrote a bad mission statement; my trouble was that the statement reflected my writing instead of the school’s core mission.
I could sit there with big words and toot my horn all night long, but the only valuable product that would come from that meeting was a mission statement that put forth the main purpose of the school district.
Live and learn.
This all pertains to a subject that has been at the center of my thinking and writing of late: small towns need to stay grounded in the things they do well, and find ways to perform these tasks better than anyone else.
Conversely,small communities need that very sense of self in order to survive the flood of urbanization that seems constantly sweeping this nation. We need to find things we do well, and do them better. We need to see what’s working, and dial it up. We need to see who is contributing to our communities, and attract others of similar strengths and skills.
There is no magic solution. But I stopped complaining about mission statements several years ago.
Why? Because an organzation (or individual) with a purpose will outlast others who are not directed in their intents.
The key is to keep the statement simple, and the mission sacred.
