5 Ways to Write a Business Aviation Mission Statement

Author By Steve Brechter
business jet at an airport mission statement

In our last two blog posts, we explained the importance of writing your flight department’s vision, mission and values statements.

In particular, we shared 5 steps to organizing a successful offsite planning meeting and 7 ways to create an inspiring vision statement.

Once you define your future state of being and finalize your vision statement, the next step isto craft the team’s mission.

These statements will define all of the actions you’re going to take in order to actualize the overarching vision — which will ultimately benefit of your parent company or host organization.

 

Here’s 5 Ways to Write your Business Aviation Mission Statement

1. Answer the”how.”
The purpose of your mission statement is to convey how you will make the vision happen. This should be written succinctly and with equal impact to your flight department team, corporate stakeholders and executive travelers.

Once you have your vision statement, identify the”how’s” by using the simple statement, “We will accomplish our vision by…” as a guide:

  • By providing the utmost safe and secure form of transportation?
  • By delivering first-class customer service on every mission?
  • By adopting industry best practices?
  • By operating in the most cost-effective manner?
  • By maintaining a ready-to-launch strategic business weapon so your executive team can strike on time-sensitive business opportunities?

 

2. Be ultra-specific
Remember to be ultra-specific and write so you can measure. Break things down by discrete elements such as safety, service and budget (cost). Every time Gray Stone develops an Aviation Performance Dashboard for a client, all of our metrics and measurements of performance begin at the mission statement. This is especially important if you aspire to registration to ISO 9001 or another Quality Management System.

 

3. Keep it simple.
There’s no need for filling an entire page.  From our experience, the most effective mission statements are just a few sentences that address your vision and how you intend to accomplish it. To give you a sense of what to include consider:

  • Highlighting your discriminators (time savings,safety, service delivery).
  • Describing the benefits you provide to the end-users.

 

4. Be inspiring
Once you’ve drafted your mission statement, review each word. Does each one having meaning? Are you inspired to spring into action? It’s okay to use adjectives to spice things up—just don’t use too much hyperbole. The purpose is not to “wow” your marketing department. But you will want to create a clear, powerful, and broad enough guide post to explain what it is you’re trying to accomplish. If you want your stakeholders to boast about your operations, give them something memorable

5. Use It
There’s no reason to spend up to a day working on your vision and mission statements, only to put a piece of paper in a drawer or to create a poster for the hangar wall.

Nor is this intended as a “feel good” exercise or a reason to check a box.Rather, your mission statement needs to become a point of reference so you can continuously look at your projects and see if they relate to actualizing your vision.

For example, if you’re considering a course of action that’s unrelated to your vision or mission, it’s OK for you and your flight department team to ask yourselves if it’s really of value and/or the right time to take on a distraction. If not, then you either need to stop what you’re doing or revise your mission accordingly.

Hosting an offsite planning meeting will help you facilitate the creation of your organization’s vision and mission statements, which are both critical components to becoming a best-in-class flight department. By implementing the above how-to steps, you’ll be ready for the fourth and final step in the process–writing your values statement.

Next post: How to write value statements for your flight department.

 

Next step:

Does your vision and mission statement need work? How about your values statements? Perhaps your team could benefit from a strategy session or offsite meeting facilitated by impartial business aviation experts? If so, take a look our Way Forward program. Or get in touch with Gray Stone Advisors for a no-obligation discussion.