Mission: The North Star of Great Governance

Why a clear, gut-level mission transforms good governance into greatness

Mandates and missions define the course of leadership, shaping whether governance is merely functional or truly transformative.

As highlighted in this week’s TL;dr, a clear and compelling mission can propel bold action, while a poorly aligned or poorly executed mission erodes trust and effectiveness. Great governance requires more than ambition — it demands a mission that resonates deeply with both leaders and the public.

Today, we’ll explore why a clear, well-communicated mission is the cornerstone of effective governance and how it transforms the challenges of leadership into opportunities for trust, alignment, and impact. And because I know you’re busy and already have plenty of emails to plow through, I’m working to follow my own advice that less is more. These Friday deep dives will be a little less deep — focused, actionable, and easier to digest.

Navigating Challenges with a Stellar Mission

The clear understanding of a government agency’s mission can make or break its effectiveness. Simple as that. It’s the organizing principle that drives internal excellence, helping to break down departmental silos and driving the multi-disciplinary initiatives necessary to achieve the organization’s vision. For external audiences, it must be a compelling expression of the agency’s raison d'être such that you can look citizens in the eye when discussing a challenging project and say, “Yes, in your backyard,” with confidence and integrity.

I hasten to add here that I’m not talking about a formal Mission Statement. Those are important, certainly. Creating good ones is a critical, fundamental exercise for elected officials and senior staff to go through when working on strategic plans, along with expressions of organizational Vision and Values.

I’m talking about gut-level mission¹. In my nearly 24 years working for a single government agency as its communications director I don’t think I could have ever recited, verbatim, our Mission Statement. But I sure as hell knew the gut-level mission for the City of Round Rock, Texas. It went something like this:

Economic development is a priority because business and industry pay more in taxes than they demand in services, which is how we keep our property tax rate low; we’re hyper-focused on addressing traffic congestion, because that’s the No. 1 problem cited by our citizens; and we’re going to get great at developing and executing infrastructure master plans because that’s the best way to manage a rapidly growing community.

Fundamental to a gut-level mission is that it speaks to improving people’s quality of life. I must give credit to mentors Hans and Annemarie Bleiker for this insight and many of the others I’ll share in this post. I keep returning to what I learned from them more than 25 years ago because the practicality of what they taught me proved spectacularly effective.

Your mission must connect to tangible outcomes like reduced traffic, more resilient infrastructure, and enhanced public safety. For the public, that means less time sitting in congestion, water and wastewater systems that keep functioning even in extreme weather, and being able to feel safe while walking alone in your neighborhood at night.

So how do you know, and I mean really know, what’s important to your citizens? If your answer relies on regularly reviewing comments on the organization’s Facebook page, yer doin’ it wrong. Regular, scientifically valid surveys are a best practice for high performing organizations. Here’s a link to my deep dive on surveys if you haven’t made that investment. There, you’ll learn that public sentiment expressed via social media is the opposite of what the general public thinks 70 percent of the time.

Keeping the Signal Strong: Communicating Your Mission Effectively

Clear, consistent communication of your mission builds credibility with the public. When your mission is tied to fundamental quality-of-life issues important to your community, folks are more likely to understand and support tough decisions. It allows you to tell residents, “Yes, in your backyard,” with the confidence that comes from acting in alignment with shared priorities, like extending an arterial road to improve traffic flow.

Here’s another key to mission. You have more than one! Yes, there’s an overarching organizational mission, but each department has its own gut-level mission, too. That mission needs to “nest” within the big mission². Those difficult projects you need to implement have missions as well.

Here are some of the Bleiker’s keys to effective communication of mission:

• Why Matters More Than What: Why your agency exists and Why you do what you do is “ten times as important” as What it is that you do.

• Don’t Rely on Data: Scientific information isn’t nearly as compelling as anecdotal information. People remember stories. They forget numbers.

• Tell Your History: Use specific names, dates, and anecdotes to illustrate why your agency does what it does. A public agency is a living, evolving entity, often shaped by inherited challenges that may not always seem logical or intentional. These complexities become relatable and understandable when you share the story of how they came to be.

• Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Talk about your mission(s) regularly. Technocrats tend to vastly underestimate the importance of the public’s understanding of mission, and they often don’t appreciate the difficulty of doing so effectively.