Have you ever read a company’s mission statement and thought an AI could’ve generated it?
Well, it actually might have been.
A quick Google search for “mission statement generator” yields dozens of results for such tools and even blog posts ranking these tools from best to worst. These generators ask a few short questions — What’s your company’s name? In four words or less, what’s the good or service you provide? — and you’ll receive a mission statement moments later.
Tools like these aren’t exactly groundbreaking or newsworthy, but they reveal why workforces can easily become disconnected from their company’s vision. Mission statements are naturally short and often lack the details needed to inspire or guide employees in their daily tasks. Yet company leaders can mistakenly believe a short sentence sufficient for a website’s about page will be enough to instill team members with a sense of purpose or a roadmap for the future.
An organization’s ability to achieve its mission hinges on whether team members receive a detailed blueprint or a vague description of future goals. The process of turning goals into actions starts from the top — leadership must be in tune with members and continuously reinforce the overall vision — and makes its way down to all organizational levels.
Built In Seattle spoke with leaders at local companies Identity Digital and Trupanion to learn more about how they create truly mission-driven teams.
A Thought Exercise
Trupanion is a pet insurance provider that aims to help cats and dogs worldwide access the best medical care. Founded in 2000, Trupanion is the only provider that can pay veterinary hospitals directly.
What is Trupanion’s mission?
Our mission is to help loving, responsible pet owners budget and care for their pets.
As a leader, how do you translate this mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
My team is dedicated to delivering a top-notch experience for the hospitals and our members during their visits. As we set our monthly goals or projects, we ask ourselves, “How does this help the pet, the member and the hospital?” For example, will this action help deliver friction-free claims or pre-approval experience, or will this task help get the Trupanion offer in front of more pet owners?
We know that pets will have the best health outcome when they have Trupanion. Whether the member wants to see if the treatment is covered before the procedure or when the time comes to file a claim, were we able to deliver? Holding ourselves accountable to deliver this experience helps us stay closer to our mission to drive the best outcome for the pet.
Honesty is deeply-rooted in our company culture. Matching our words with actions and following through on our commitments are the best aspects that reflect our mission.”
What aspect of your company culture or values best reflects Trupanion’s mission?
Honesty is deeply-rooted in our company culture. Matching our actions with our words and following through on our commitments are the best aspects that reflect our company mission. To deliver better health outcomes for the pets, we need to deliver on our promise to the members that there will be no payout limit and that we will be able to pay their veterinarian. An example is keeping our promise of being able to pay the member’s veterinarian at the time of the invoice. We hold ourselves accountable to deliver on this promise by having service-level agreements on delivering a seamless experience.
Identity Digital, formerly known as Donuts Inc, aims to inspire businesses and people to develop and own their digital identities via impactful domain names. The company owns a vast portfolio of domains and securely operates over 25 million domains.
What is Identity Digital’s mission?
Our mission statement is, “inspire people and businesses to own their uncompromised digital identity through choice, reliability and availability.”
I encourage my teams to keep focus — if you are asked to take on a new initiative that will not impact one of our functional actions, stop and ask why you are doing this.”
As a leader, how do you translate this mission into specific actions or goals for your team?
Team and individual goals should cascade from the company mission all the way through the organization. At Identity Digital, our CEO and leadership team start at the company level and develop the key themes or priorities for the company as a whole. I then work with my team to identify functional actions we can take as a people team to deliver on those themes. Once functional actions are identified, we can tackle goals for each of our teams and team members.
For example, consider one of the company’s themes: “Achieve double-digit earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) growth.” The functional action would be to build a strong employer brand that attracts top talent and engages and retains current and future team members. The team goals would be to deliver exceptional hiring and onboarding experiences for candidates and hiring managers resulting in a 90-day target time to fill, as well as to cultivate a highly engaged culture with regrettable annual turnover at or below a certain percent and an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of at least 80 percent.
I encourage my teams to keep focus — if you are asked to work on a project or take on a new initiative that will not impact one of our functional actions, stop and ask why you are doing this.
What aspect of your company culture or values best reflects Identity Digital’s mission?
As an organization, we strive to encourage and inspire individuals and businesses to represent themselves online in the most authentic ways possible — to be undeniably you — and own both sides of the “dot” with our top-level domains (TLDs). As a company, our values embrace innovation, teamwork, growth, integrity and success.
There are so many aspects to our culture that are positive and contribute to our achieving our mission. It is hard to limit to just one, but I will say it is how we all come together as one team and respect the differences each team member brings to our company, products and customers.
We encourage flexibility, understanding we all have different needs and ways of working. We show appreciation regularly through our many formal recognition programs or informal Slack shout-outs. We want every team member to show up “undeniably you” every day!
