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Having a personal mission statement can make you more effective at your job. This advice should be part of a career owner’s manual, and many would argue it is: Stephen Covey’s seminal book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” touts personal mission statements in Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind.
According to Covey, a personal mission statement should “define what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.” It should be the basis for all decision-making and empower people with “timeless strength” to “flow with change.”
But how effective are personal mission statements if your end in mind is a new job? What do people with hiring influence care about your life’s credo?
What’s the Impact of a University’s Mission Statement?
There’s an aphorism shared by higher education marketers that goes, “You don’t sell a car using the owner’s manual,” meaning that prospective students or donors will be unmoved by an institution’s mission statement. In other words, don’t put it on your website homepage or recruiting material.
Here’s an example of a university’s mission statement: “transform the intellectual, social, physical, and leadership capacities of students in order to prepare them for life and career success.”
It might be effective and serve the institution well. But it’s not going to rouse interest from outsiders. Parts of it could also be an effective personal mission statement for a higher education professional, when written to be timeless and not bound by a specific job or institution.
Covey acknowledged that personal mission statements should be unique, both in content and form. He wrote that principles are “guidelines for human conduct” and values are “maps for the way things should be.”
A personal mission statement, Covey wrote, is “the map of your territory.” Think of it as your career owner’s manual. Still, you shouldn’t initially present ambiguous terms like honesty, sincerity or creativity to prospective employers.
What you need is a good elevator pitch.
Sell the ‘Car,’ Where you Can Potentially Take People
An elevator pitch is a sales pitch delivered by one person to another in the time it takes for them to ride in an elevator together, or approximately 30 seconds to two minutes. When the “sale” is your job candidacy, an elevator pitch is how you introduce yourself at job fairs and networking opportunities, or by answering the “tell me about yourself” prompt in a job interview.
For many people, a sales pitch might seem self-serving, manipulative or just plain icky. That’s because they approach it as a transaction, as if their personal mission is to make money or obtain a position, instead of their true mission: transforming individuals or organizations.
In other words, don’t try selling your career owner’s manual; sell “the car,” which is where you can hypothetically take people.
The key is to make it about your work, not you. It’s often easier in Western culture in which the most common question upon meeting someone is “What do you do?”
Timothy Keller, the late Presbyterian pastor and author of “Every Good Endeavor,” defines work as “rearranging the raw materials of a particular domain to draw out its potential for the flourishing of everyone.”
How to Create your Elevator Pitch
That’s a simple model for taking your personal mission statement and making it into an elevator pitch because it allows for the specificity to be unique without the vagueness of mission statements.
Start with WHO YOU ARE. Your name, job title or academic degree, department and university name will do.
Next, describe the WORK YOU DO. Take the pieces of Keller’s definition of work and put them into a story arc using your contributions and achievements:
- Once upon a time equates to the raw materials of a particular domain (your students, relationships, online platforms, data, ideas and other resources).
- Then suddenly you rearrange them (inspire, make conclusions, form partnerships).
- And then you draw out their potential (achieve learning outcomes, develop a new curriculum, save an institution money, solve a problem).
- They lived happily ever after is the flourishing of everyone (a graduate gets hired, enrollment increases, coworkers get promoted or published, anything for the public good).
Keep it succinct. If the person wants to know more, let them ask.
Here’s an example:
“I’ve been a health and physical education instructor for six years at two teaching institutions in the Midwest. My passion is when I get to teach first-generation college students from rural areas, they meet with community partners who work with one of my service-learning classes, and then after they graduate, they use what they learned to find solutions to the problems in their communities back home.”
Finish with WHAT’S NEXT. Describe who you want to be, that you’re seeking a new “particular domain” or how you’d like to collaborate with a set of “raw materials” to help more people “flourish.” Don’t use Keller’s exact words, but instead make it your own. Then invite the person to connect or consider you for a future job.
The values and principles that are part of your personal mission statement can still be the basis for your elevator pitch. Just emphasize the work you do. The instructor above might instead value mentoring, research or an innovative pedagogy instead of community outreach.
Don’t try to sell potential employers with a mission statement, show them what they’re potentially getting with a quick story. They’ll think of their own institution and, who knows, perhaps they’ll start selling you on the idea of working there.
