An Exercise to Make Your Mission Statement Come to Life

Do you have a mission statement for your practice—a declaration of your values, your philosophy, and your commitment to patients that is posted publicly in your office and on your website? If so, my next question is, if I were to ask a member of your team to recite the main points of that statement, would they be able to do it? Don’t get me wrong—I believe that a mission statement, or statement of core values, is a very worthwhile document to create. Just the exercise of crafting it, of putting your deepest convictions into words, is great because it forces you to think about your practice and your purpose in a very pure way. It’s something we have put a lot of thought into here at Spear, as I wrote about in this article.

The problem arises when these well-crafted words end up losing their power through familiarity, or are forgotten all together and, worst of all, are contradicted by the team’s (or your) actions. (We all have our own stories, I’m sure, of dealing with a place of business where we are dismayed by the gap between the declared values framed on the wall and the actual values as demonstrated in the experience we get.) So I propose this exercise to bring a dormant mission statement back to life. Print out copies and make it a focus of discussion in your next team meeting. Have people take turns expressing what the words mean to them. Ask for examples.

For instance, if there is language about “providing the highest level of care possible for our patients,” have team members recount when someone on the staff went “above and beyond” to provide an exceptional caring experience. “A commitment to staying on the leading of developments in dentistry”? To “providing comprehensive care”? Talk about what you have done recently, in terms of education and transformative cases, which exemplifies what is meant by those words. Then talk about what you are going to do, going forward as a practice, to continue to honor your declared promises. A truly useful mission statement does not exist just to inform patients but also to inspire everyone on the team, every day, to live up to the ideals within it. In that sense it is very much a living thing. And that’s why it is important to keep it alive.