Mission & Vision Builder
Team Alignment
Workshop Goals
- Provide the team with clarity and conviction about why they exist and what their charge is.
- Create simple, yet powerful, mission and vision statements that the team can leverage and reference moving forward.
- Link the team's work to the company's mission.
Description
Use this fill-in-the-blank worksheet to crowd-source a creative and compelling mission and vision for your team. Bring everyone's voice into the discussion by allowing each team member to draft their own mission and vision first; in a team experience, work to combine everyone's input into one coherent mission and vision for the entire team. An excellent activity for new teams, teams in transition, or high-performing teams, it helps create alignment while also exciting everyone for the work you do. Use this tool if your team is lacking clear direction, or if you want to work on building an impactful and clear message for communication with stakeholders!
Quick FAQs
TIME
Two (2) 60-minute sessions
TEAM SIZE
2-12 people
FORMAT
Virtual with worksheet and session deck
EXPERIENCE CATEGORY
Team Alignment
What you'll need
Materials
For this workshop, you'll need:
- A copy of this worksheet for each member of your team
- A collaboration tool of choice (lucid, google doc, google slide) for teams to collaborate in during the experience
Templates
Make sure to duplicate this worksheet for you and your team.
Use this Brainstorming Deck during the live experience(s) to collaboratively combine your work.
Facilitator Notes
This workshop includes facilitator notes to help you lead the experience. They will help guide discussions by offering detailed tips for facilitation as well as debrief questions. As this experience is collaborative and does not have a slide deck with speaker notes, we recommend having these notes on hand.
Step-by-Step
Send the Mission & Vision Builder to your team members to complete in advance. Encourage them to take at least 30 minutes to be thoughtful in their responses and bring them to the experience.
Make sure your team understands why you are doing this work and what the end goal is. A mission and vision can turbo-charge a team's impact, identity and focus. They go beyond 'what' we do, towards how we do it, why, and for what future aspiration.
Explain that your goal is to create mission and vision statements to guide your actions and identity and also help others 'get' who we are and where we are heading (as a team).
- Consider dividing this experience into two 60-minute experiences: one for the mission, and one for the vision.
- You can use the suggested Brainstorming document to collaboratively collect ideas during the live experience. Alternatively, consider using a tool like LucidSpark which may allow more space and easier work in smaller groups. This will depend on the preferences of you and your team.
- Remind your team of the company mission and consider adding it to the shared doc. This can be valuable because we want to make sure our team mission connects to the company mission.
- It may take a few tries to get the wording right. That's okay! Though a powerful mission and vision statement does require some wordsmithing, if your team gets too lost in debating 'this' or 'that', bring their focus back to the core ideas.
- Encourage the group to build on each other's ideas rather than compete for their statement to 'win'.
- Consider following this experience with a discussion on how you plan to live by these statements as a team. What needs to happen now?
- Encourage your team to use these statements in other conversations, such as with stakeholders, to describe your team and what you do. Use them to gut-check decisions, communications, or other norms.
- Consider dedicating time on a quarterly or semi-annual basis to check in on how the team is living its mission and vision.
- Make the statements part of new team member onboarding
Not quite right?
If these sessions don't cover the topic you're looking for, seem too light-touch, or you want to take a deeper dive, we recommend taking another look at our Facilitated Team Development offerings instead. Unsure exactly what's right for your team? Contact L&D for a consultation and we'll help you find the right training for your needs!