Most companies use mission and vision statements to guide their actions, decisions, and culture. Mission statements can also help functional teams and business units by giving new purpose and identity to groups that may feel undervalued or seen as bureaucratic necessities. Procurement leaders, ask yourselves: do I need a mission statement?
For procurement, shifting from reactive, transactional work to strategic, intentional operations requires communicating a common vision and aligning strategic goals across the team. This is where a mission statement plays a key role.
Building Alignment Through a Shared Mission
Mission statements help teams and their stakeholders rally around a unified vision and set of goals. During mission development, leaders must communicate clearly and create buy-in within the group and among external stakeholders. Understanding how changes affect finance, HR, operations, and IT helps align procurement’s mission with the objectives of business units and the broader company.
Making the Mission Statement Actionable
How can a mission statement become actionable and shape the team’s mindset? Quantitative measures like savings or diversity spend remain important on the procurement scorecard, but qualitative factors—the “intangibles”—often define the core of a procurement team’s mission.
Key Questions to Define Your Procurement Mission
Answering the following questions can help define a procurement team’s mission and reveal areas for improvement:
- Does an organization go beyond purchasing and achieve successful collaboration with strategic partners?
- Is the team integrated enough into business decisions to identify opportunities that reduce demand or consolidate spend between business units to drive volume incentives?
- Are reductions in total cost of ownership captured due to the team’s working knowledge of the company’s operations?
- What does success look like and why?
- What are the indicators that will be evident once the organization has reached its goals?
- What new functions has the organization adopted in an ideal future state?
- What are the current challenges to overcome?
- Do we measure success by dollars saved, or social responsibility? Or something else altogether?
Once the team addresses these gaps, leaders can translate the end-state objectives into a mission and vision. These statements guide the team toward the ideal state and provide inspiration and focus when challenges arise.
A Mission That Scales With Your Team
These concepts apply to procurement teams of any size, from 2 to 200 employees. A shared understanding of purpose and identity, expressed through a mission statement, motivates the team and keeps it focused on achieving objectives while sustaining growth.
