Mission Statement for Families

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia “Management Universe” at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)

In effective, successful and happy families, husband and wife implicitly or explicitly talk about, discuss and deliberate and at times write down on what kind of mission statement they should formulate for their family. The mission statement then provides them the guidance they need to run their families. It is always a good idea to write down the mission statement so that it has the required clarity and it can be shared with family members easily and correctly.

Given below is an elaborate or comprehensive specimen mission statement for families (you need not copy it for your family but definitely can pick up some clues from it to work out the mission statement for your family).

-        (Unconditional) love, affection, care, consideration, concern, respect, decency, decorum, trust (no secrecy or ulterior motives), right kind of values- the foundation principles (no compromise on them).

-        Promoting, facilitating, innovating and nurturing emotional, intellectual and physical intimacies between husband and wife and developing short term and long term friendship, companionship and camaraderie (the three words may have similar meanings but just to heighten the importance of this aspect of husband-wife relationship, all the three are used). However, despite being intimate, discourage development of familiarity between the two- give each other the deserved space in adequate measures (at times you may feel free not to share few thoughts and things with each other; it’s OK so far as you are not being secretive).

-        Creating, developing and maintaining physically comfortable and hygienic environment and constantly improving it.

-        Creating, developing and maintaining decent emotional, intellectual and meaningful environment and constantly improving it.

-        Emphasis on higher levels of education with superior academic performance and constantly sharpening it- for each family member.

-        Facilitating constant growth of every family member in many directions.

-        Changing for the better continually- shed rigidities and practice flexibility in thinking, behaviors, manners, habits, actions, living style, use of technology etc as appropriate with changing situations and time.

-        Emphasis and constant attention on family health and improving overall health status of all the family members.

-        Creating and maintaining financially sound status (immediate and long term)- desire and efforts to earn more and acquire and utilize the resources prudently with no wastage.

-        Open communication, empathy and cooperation (no resentments, no sulking, no competition or no need to prove to each other or to evaluate/judge/criticize each other or to constantly correct each other, readiness in apologizing and forgiving) among husband and wife and children- promoting  overall positiveness.

-        Facilitate creating an environment where each family member can develop an eye for recognizing others’ qualities and learn to appreciate and praise the other family members generously and yet genuinely- pretensions and fakeness to be kept away and no politics please.

-        Giving family a decent social status. (Therefore, doing a socially respectable and meaningful profession- self employment or otherwise- becomes important. Meaningful jobs, good organizations, good designations, good perks etc).

-        High level of attention to the rightful growth of/achievement by children so that they become excellent human beings, superior professionals and capable of nurturing their own families in the best ways when they start one of their own.

-        Help develop right kind of maturity (of thoughts, ideas, reactions/responses and actions) in each family member.

-        Having full faith and confidence in the overall soundness of family without any need to strike comparisons with others/other families/societies of the world- developing absoluteness and not comparisons (do comparisons only for the purpose of learning from others and not for competing or for feeling inferior or superior after comparisons).

-        Creating and maintaining overall happiness for all the family members as individuals and family as a whole (the togetherness).