Leadership / Management

Click for Printable Version

The pattern is so common and predictable that no matter what company is involved; it appears to be operating from a standard script.  Senior leaders become enthralled with stating or restating the mission, vision, or values of the organization.  With trumpets and fanfare, they assemble a group to talk concepts, words, and commas.  Weeks later, a draft document is approved.  A short time after that, it is printed and sent to all key managers.  And then ….nothing happens.  Nothing changes.  Nothing is different. 

It is not supposed to be that way, of course.  Clearly, the standard wisdom tells us that effective leaders help establish a vision, set standards for performance, and create focus and direction for common efforts.  However, most would agree that that part is the easy part.  The tough part is turning a mission statement into an effective action plan. 

For at least two decades, establishing a vision for the organization has been explicitly recognized as imperative for management.  A few years ago when the Wilson Learning Corporation surveyed twenty-five thousand employees from the finance, automotive, and high-tech industries, respondents said they wanted a leader who could “convey clearly what the work unit is supposed to do.” 

The bottom line?  Companies must put their mission statements into action.  Deeds must back up rhetoric.  Organizations must “walk the talk.”  To do otherwise is to invite broad charges of merely paying lip service, or worse, outright hypocrisy.  Management must live by the mission statement it creates.  It will be judged both by employees and outsiders on how the words become action. 

If you study companies that do not just draft great statements of purpose, but also make them happen, you will find that in the process they typically move through five major phases – focus, awareness, understanding, commitment, and action.  These five phases are fairly standard to many change models.  But it is critical to keep in mind, especially as the push to bring a statement to life drags on, that each of these five stages increases in effort and importance as you move along.  Put in the simplest terms, the amount of organization time, the number of people, the portion of budget, and the degree of personal energy required to move from vision or values to action, must increase from one stage to the next.  Each phase has actions that are critical just to it.   

Phase I:  Focus 

Whether leading a small work team or a huge division encompassing thousands, you must do three things well during the focus phase.  First, you must include as large a group of people as possible to talk about what needs to be different in order for the organization to be competitive.  There are a number of “culture mapping” tools out there, but the process does not require anything more than getting people to agree to a few words that describe how the organization is functioning now versus how it should be working three years from now. 

After that discussion has taken place, you need a much smaller group of representatives to actually draft the new statement.  You as leaders need to agree to the final draft, but that does not mean you have to write the statement yourself or even be with the group that does.  Many leaders fret over the line-by-line drafting to an irrational degree.  Keep in mind that the end here is not the statement itself, but rather pursuing a process to align people behind key organizational ideals. 

Third, whatever is proposed as an almost final draft needs to be reviewed by some larger fraction of the group that discussed the need to change at the outset.   It is helpful to have people who will live and work with the new statement, review it for accuracy of intent, completeness, and clarity. 

Phase II:  Awareness    

A group of forty senior managers once met off site at a mountain top resort to draft a guiding statement for their business unit.   They spent three days debating.  They loved the new core principles they came up with.  They all “signed off” on what was drafted the following week by a sub-team.  Then the statement was published – insofar as the copy was sent to each of the forty “authors” who promptly filed it in their desks and went about their business.   

Awareness is the second phase of bringing a mission to life.  What is key in building awareness is not so much specific steps as an attitude.  You must want to share the new embodiment of your collective desires with everyone – all employees, all leaders, even customers and suppliers.  Why?  Because the statement is a contract that pinpoints where you are trying to lead your organization and what operational standards you intend to observe.   

An all-employee launch meeting for the new statement is a great start, but don’t stop there.  The supporting ancillary readings, materials, or speakers’ comments you inject into the organization to keep “the campaign” going will be absorbed by employees. 

Consider Ford’s “Quality is Job One” effort.  Ford’s awareness effort was so well blazoned forth that even people with no connection to the company began to see what the automaker was trying to do.  People who were closer to the effort – those who saw the more detailed internal statements attached to it – knew that leaders at many levels made total awareness of the direction statements, the foundation for building further employee involvement.   

Phase III:  Understanding 

Unfortunately, words on paper can be subject to widely varying interpretations.  This may be one reason why Hewlett-Packard had no statement to define “The HP Way” for many of the company’s early years.  Management was more concerned that every HP member thoroughly discuss the direction of the company and how it planned to get there than it was with framing some document in oak and hanging it on walls. 

Nothing will improve your chances for successfully achieving widespread comprehension of a new vision statement more than having teams start to define “what’s to be different” in how work gets done.  By having individuals and teams identify an alternate future reality, you indicate clearly that the company is not just interested in new “talk.”  The “walk” is the true prize. 

The end here is not the mission statement itself.  It is the aligning of people behind key goals.  You and the entire leadership team need to meet with people regularly to talk about, explain, and clarify what the new statement means operationally.  Minus that level of coaching, the status quo will prevail for one simple reason — no one really knows what needs to be different in light of the new direction. 

Phase IV:  Commitment

James Burke became legendary when he was CEO of Johnson & Johnson because he openly acknowledged that the well-wrought “credo” of the company was not, in fact, always the standard for its day-to-day business behaviors.  In “Credo Challenge” sessions which involved thousands of people in small groups, Burke challenged the rest of the company to talk about the “credo,” to change it where appropriate, but to commit to making the statement happen.   

What Burke was doing then, and what you need to do in the commitment phase, was making sure that the majority of employees and leaders agree with the new statement and direction.  You need to ask for people’s support.  Not everyone will give it.  It is far better to learn that at a fairly early stage, than to wait for a clutch organizational moment when performance or productivity is under intense scrutiny only to find that “Quality” is really “Job Nine” to some team members.  The best way to put intentions to the test is to immerse them in the crucible of an aggressive goal-setting process.  You need to have ample dialogue supporting it to assure that everyone is stretching to make the tenets of the new statement real. 

Phase V:  Action 

Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck, authors of The Winning Streak (now out of print), tell a compelling story about the breakthrough performance achieved by companies fully committed to making their missions a reality.  MFI Furniture Group opened a new store in Glasgow, Scotland, right after Christmas.  Snow conditions made travel so miserable that it took the managing director of the company thirteen hours to get from London to Glasgow.  But the store opened successfully.  Hundreds of MFI volunteers from London to Manchester, having heard the news of the bad weather, deduced that there was a problem, and without being directed or asked, came to help out.  Goldsmith and Clutterbuck quoted an MFI executive, “They simply heard the news on the grapevine and made their way as fast and as best as they could.  Eventually we had so many volunteers we were turning them away because we couldn’t find enough for them to do.” 

That is action.  The complete knitting together of purpose or direction with leadership and employee conduct.  Action will not happen unless at least two criteria are met.  First, your organizational unit must have weekly, monthly, and quarterly operational plans that tally with the new mission or values.  When a company like Motorola positions itself to compete worldwide in countries like Japan, employees in North America or Europe must translate that into taking classes on Japanese language and culture and the myriad other things required to be a global competitor. 

Ted Kinni, the author of America’s Best, which recounts the detailed learning’s of the sixty-two manufacturing companies that have won a “Best Plants” award from Industry Week since 1990, is emphatic about the need to convert idle words to muscular motion.  “Best plants move their dreams closer to reality by developing strategic plans which are ultimately connected to and integrated with intent statements, and by deploying those plans down to the daily operating goals of the operation.” 

Kinni says that among the sixty-two winners, each put a primary emphasis on converting purpose into actionable plans, a hands-on blueprint that plant workers could follow.  A governing statement is discounted in importance if it does not truly govern all the actions of the enterprise every day. 

But there is a second requirement to action.  For all the rub-off glitter that has been attached to words like “passion” and “soul,” it is important to note that companies heralded for achieving their purpose do seem to have a special “feel” about them.  In the best organizations I have personally been associated with, there is a sincere appeal by the leadership to employees.  It is an appeal to the heart.  It is an appeal to become a top performer, not just a good performer.  The bottom line is that an effective leader must be practical, demonstrating a high regard for money, economics, and the business basics.  However, it is simply wrong-headed to discount the importance of people being emotionally invested if the vision is to come to life. 

Launching a new purpose/direction document via a short-term burst of personal enthusiasm is not enough.  The first person who must remain charged, keep the message going strong, and urge people to stay energized about making a vision a reality is the leader who chartered it.  The pace and fervor of everyone participating in your organization’s long march to greatness will always be up for question, unless you are at the head of the line cheering them on. 

Checklist for Turning the Mission Statement into Reality 

1.  An effective mission statement does not just focus on corporate identity, i.e., who we are or who we wish to be.  It, also makes a concrete statement about what we will do and why. 

2.  Companies that produce effective mission statements move through five phases – focus, awareness, understanding, commitment, and action. 

3.  Each phase requires more effort than the previous one. 

4.  It is important to define “what is to be done differently” about how work will get done.  Imagine a future reality, then figure out what the organization needs to do to arrive there. 

5.  Mission statement team members and senior leadership should explain, clarify, and otherwise communicate with the rest of the organization about putting the statement into operational reality. 

6.  The majority of employees and leaders should agree with the new mission statement. 

7.  In the final phase of creating and integrating a mission statement into an organization comes action — the complete knitting together of purpose, direction, and behavior. 

For more information about Ken Chapman and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman at 205.366.0265 or email Ken at kchapman@leaderscode.com.

<END>

Click for Printable Version