Writing A Mission Statement

I have taken on two members of staff which has tripled the size of my business.  I am no longer a one man band, I am now the leader of a team.  Admittedly this is literally the smallest team it is numerically possible to have, but it is nonetheless a team.  And the first thing I need to do is to establish what our mission as a team is.  I haven’t  articulated it during the interview process.  In both cases there are people I have approached to work for me so it was a case of persuading them that I had a viable offer rather than interrogating them for what they could do for me.  So as things stand, they don’t have much of an idea of what I want from them.

So I need to tell them what we are doing so they know what decisions to make on a day to day basis.  This means I need a lot of clarity about what the goal is.  To achieve clarity one of the things I often do is to write something, often with an imaginary reader in mind.  (This works well for blog posts, which generally only have imaginary readers.)  

In this case the readers are far from imaginary and at least I know that what I am going to write will be read with some degree of interest.  So it really will be a mission statement.  

I am actually more interested in the next stage which will be writing the day to day procedures we will be following.  But I can’t do that without first deciding on the mission that those procedures will be serving.