Your Mission Statement Is Theater.

I’ve sat through those meetings. You know the ones. The leadership team locked in a conference room for eight hours, trying to wordsmith a mission statement that captures the essence of what the company does, why it matters, and where it’s going.

Someone suggests “empower.” Someone else counters with “enable.” A third person insists we need “leverage” in there somewhere. By hour six, everyone’s exhausted. By hour seven, someone proposes we just vote. By hour eight, you’ve got a statement that sounds impressive, checks all the boxes, and means absolutely nothing to anyone who has to actually do the work.

The problem isn’t lack of effort. Everyone in that room is smart, committed, and genuinely trying to articulate something meaningful. The problem is the entire exercise is built on a false premise: that you can committee-design inspiration. That the right combination of powerful verbs and aspirational nouns will somehow create alignment and motivation.

It won’t.

Then comes the rollout. Company-wide meeting. Big reveal. The new mission statement gets projected on a screen. Leadership tries to generate enthusiasm. Middle management nods dutifully. Individual contributors check their phones. Someone from HR prints it on posters. Someone else updates the website. A few people change their email signatures.

Three months later, nobody can remember what it said. Six months later, the posters are peeling off the break room walls. A year later, someone suggests maybe we should revisit our mission statement because it doesn’t feel relevant anymore.

I lived this at multiple companies. Participated in the theater. Watched the predictable arc from initial excitement to collective forgetting. And here’s what I finally understood: the problem isn’t that we wrote bad mission statements. The problem is that mission statements themselves are fundamentally disconnected from how humans actually connect to work.

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What We Did Instead

At Wavefront, we tried something different. We called them “observable behaviors.” Not what we aspired to be, not some lofty ideal we’d get to someday. Just what we actually did that made us different.

“Act like you own the company” was one.

Sounds simple, right? But it meant something specific. Don’t pass by something that “isn’t yours” to solve. Could be as simple as picking up a scrap of trash. Could be not allowing a lame idea to pass committee just because everyone’s tired. The owner, the leader, doesn’t settle.

True. Observable. You could point to it in the wild.

That behavior created everything else. Ownership. Accountability. Standards. Pride in the work.

But even that framework wasn’t quite right for what I’m doing now. Because observable behaviors still described a collective. A company. A team. And what I’m building now is fundamentally about individuals.

The Thing My Wife Invented

Kymberlee created this for Storytelling School. Calls it a building statement.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Give it five years, every consultant will be selling building statement workshops. LinkedIn will be full of them. They’ll become the new corporate speak we’re trying to escape.

Fair.

But here’s the difference: I can prove every word of mine. It’s not aspirational language I’m hoping becomes true. It’s documentation of work already happening. That’s the litmus test. If you can’t point to evidence of what you’re building right now, you don’t have a building statement. You have an aspiration wearing a new label.

Key word is “building.”

“I am building.”

Not “Our mission is.” Not “We aspire to.” Not “We believe in.” Present tense. Active verb. Personal commitment.

This is radically different from a mission statement. A mission statement describes what an organization hopes to be. A building statement documents what an individual is actively creating right now. One is aspirational and collective. The other is documentary and personal.

Mine is: “I’m building a multigenerational network of thought leaders by integrating technology, creativity, and storytelling to empower voices and incite change.”

When I say that at a networking event for Coastal Intelligence, people stop. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s real. I can prove every word of it.

I’m actually building this network. Thousands of podcast interviews over the years. Dozens of people coached onto TEDx stages. Hundreds of Making Waves long-form conversations. An improv group that spans ages 23 to 70. Coastal Intelligence gatherings bringing multiple generations of tech leaders together. The Elder Council show with Duey Freeman, talking to younger men about what we’ve learned.

The “inte