It doesn't matter if you work for a nonprofit organization, Fortune 500 company, church, or a small business, you need to have a mission statement. A mission statement is what directs, guides, and motivates the employees of your company to work hard and make a difference. My favorite way to write a mission statement is to include as many employees as possible and use individual words to create a mission statement.

The first step to writing a mission statement is to include as many people as possible in the process. You must do this if you want everyone at your company to "buy in" on the mission statement that is created. One of the worst things you can do is send your top executives out to some corporate planning retreat, let them put a new mission statement together, and then have them try to push and enforce it onto the rest of the company. If you want your entire company to buy in on your new mission statement, they need to be included in the process. When you sit down to create your mission statement, you want everyone from the C.E.O. to the mailman ready to participate in the process.

The second step is brainstorming. Have a dry erase board ready to write and have the strongest leader at your company takes over and asks everyone in the room to describe in one word sentences what your company is, does, and wants to become. Words such as "great," "leader," "#1," "best," "service," and other words that describe the company. Every word goes on the board, you will be able to discard the ones you don't like later.

After everyone in the room has ran out of words to use to describe what your company is, does, and wants to become you will now select what words you want to combine into a sentence(s) to form your mission statement. While first doing this, you can have several mission statements. Play with them, change them and tweak them until you finally find and develop one that you and the rest of your company like.

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