Editorial
Mission and vision statements guide the direction of organizations, departments and teams. A mission statement defines your organization’s purpose and core objectives, while a vision statement paints a picture of the future that you aspire to achieve. These statements not only clarify what you aim to accomplish but also inspire alignment and focus among employees.
I argue that the learning and development function can also benefit from creating its own mission and vision statement. The exercise of writing these will add clarity to your work and how it aligns with broader organizational goals. Once the statements are finalized, they provide clarity, direction and motivation for your training team and help communicate L&D's value to external stakeholders.
Here's how to get started.
Learning and Development Specific Statements
When a training team has a distinct mission and vision, separate from the overall organization’s mission and vision, it helps highlight the function’s specific role within the broader organization and offers guidelines to shape your strategic learning and development (L&D) plan.
The process of developing your training team's mission encourages reflection on how your work serves the organization’s broader goals and articulates the unique focus of your function. Similarly, developing a vision encourages long-term thinking about how the training team should evolve as the organization progresses. It also translates the organization’s future vision into a more tangible future for the training function and offers inspiration and motivation to reach that desired state.
When these statements become core to your team’s operations and planning, it creates alignment between your training team’s daily activities and the company’s strategic goals and provides a foundation for long-term growth.
How L&D Can Develop a Mission and Vision Statement
The development of a training team's mission and vision statement should follow a defined process.
Select Contributors
Start by deciding who should be involved. You might opt for a team exercise to generate ideas, which fosters collaboration and buy-in amongst your team. Alternatively, if you're in a leadership role or have a small team, you may prefer to draft the statement yourself. In some cases, involving key stakeholders — such as HR or department heads — ensures the statement reflects broader organizational needs.
Clarify How L&D Supports Company Objectives
Next, spend some time reviewing your organization's mission and vision and considering how your operations fit within them. How does your training team support your company’s goals and objectives? Consider why your function exists — what should you be doing and what shouldn’t you be doing? The process will help uncover the unique value your training function provides and the outcomes it should deliver. If you need help, there are many structured tools and visioning exercises that can help facilitate this process.
Draft Your Training Team Statements
Once you have this understanding, begin drafting your statements. Start with the vision, as it is future-focused and aspirational. The vision should describe how your training department will operate, how it will be perceived and the impact it will have in the long-term.
A great example of a vision statement comes from McDonald’s Hamburger University, the company’s global training center, which aspires to become an “organizational culture hub, introducing a continuous education process for the value chain and transforming knowledge into actual business results.”
This vision statement paints a clear picture of the future state, and highlights the importance of translating training into business outcomes, particularly within the value chain.
After crafting the vision, focus on the mission. While the vision outlines the future, the mission captures your training team's purpose. Mission statements should be concise, clear and specific about who you serve and in what way.
Training Industry Courses' mission statement is, “To improve the impact of L&D by developing learning leaders throughout their careers.”
This simple yet specific statement guides every course and program we offer, ensuring that our work focuses on improving the effectiveness of L&D leaders at all career stages.
The University of Maryland Baltimore County's training and organizational development mission is, “We enhance staff and faculty knowledge and skills with high-quality, accessible training and professional development opportunities to support UMBC’s vision of becoming the best public university of our size dedicated to undergraduate education and research.”
The mission clearly explains who they serve and how it aligns with their organizational goals.
Revisit and Revise
After drafting each statement, let them settle for a few days and then revisit with fresh eyes. Refining your mission and vision statements is a natural part of the process. These statements should evolve as your team and the organization grow. Make it a habit to regularly revisit and refine your statements to ensure they remain relevant and continue to inspire your team.
Put Your Vision and Mission Statements to Work
One of the main benefits of your mission and vision statements is their ability to direct and motivate. Yet, too often, they're created and forgotten.
To maximize their impact, integrate them into your team’s daily activities. Consider visual cues like placing them in your team’s PowerPoints or displaying them in your workspace. Use them as guideposts in your strategic L&D plan and when prioritizing stakeholder needs. These statements can also help structure one-on-one and team discussions around alignment with the mission and vision.
Stakeholders and learners should also know about your training team’s mission and vision. These statements can be powerful tools for communicating the value your training function brings to the organization, and they set clear boundaries about what your team can and cannot accomplish. Ensuring stakeholder buy-in is also crucial, as they can either help or hinder the realization of your team’s future vision.
Share them widely — incorporate them into your training materials, your intake forms, your email communications and onboarding processes. By making them a part of your core training team operations and communications, you’ll amplify their value in aligning within your team and across your constituents.
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A Framework for L&D Success
Clear mission and vision statements for training teams provide direction, alignment and motivation — and help drive teams toward success. The benefits make it well worth the time to develop these statements, especially if you commit to using them regularly to guide your work and relationships with learners and stakeholders.
Editor's Note: Dig into more learning and development coverage below:
- Balancing Hard and Soft Skills in Learning & Development — The so-called soft skills are just as important as the hard, but focusing too much on one will miss the needs of the other. Some tips to find that balance.
- How Does Learning and Development Relate to Employee Retention? — Will providing access to training keep employees from quitting as so many experts predict? Or does that question miss the point?
- Want a Skills-Based Workforce? Consider This First — There's big talk and bigger demand to become a skills-based workplace. The only problem? Companies don't know the skills they have. Some considerations.
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