What, Why and How?

Does your bureaucracy have a Mission? Do you have a Mission/Values Statement? Does anyone know about it? Does anyone act on it?

Many bureaucracies cannot answer these questions in the affirmative. Most businesses of any size have them and no good manager can plan and implement without one. If you don’t know where you are going you don’t know where you will end up. Everyone should have a mission.

When I first sat down to develop my personal mission statement I came up with “respect.help.grow.” I’ve been working on it ever since. I recently sat down with my unit which until now didn’t have a mission statement. Now we do. Here it is:

Mission Statement

Our Purpose:

Our mission is to help employers meet the reporting responsibilities that are necessary to enable the State to provide unemployment and disability programs for its citizens.

Our Values:

· Respect

· Service

· Growth

Our Method:

We ask:

· What do we do?

· Why do we do it?

· How do we do it?

· Can we do it better?

· What else can we do?

We act on the answers.

We need reasons to do what we do, reasons better than “That’s just how we do it here” or “That’s how we’ve always done it.” Everything we do should be able to be explained in terms of the mission. Anything else is expendable.