Why Your Employees Simply Do What They Think is Best? The Need for Mission Statements
I have been examining Mission Statements for the past two decades and have suggested that they tend to fall into five categories.
The Well-Designed Mission Statement
Senior Management Knows where they are taking the organization and works with employees to keep it topmost in their minds.
Empowerment! Employees have a tangible direction.
The “We finally have a Mission Statement – Now Get Back to Work”
This Mission Thing is Not Very Important. Just Meet Budget. We put this out for the Public and the Analysts. It is full of words that no one can really disagree with!
Embarrassment! Ask these employees about their Mission and 20% can tell you what it is (sort of), but they quickly admit that is not what they do each day and doesn’t really matter.
We Have No Mission – Would you consider a “Vision,” “Statement of Purpose,” or “Overarching Goal?”
Specificity is just not our thing. We’d prefer to be vague.
We Loosely Know What We Want! Good thing that this statement doesn’t affect me day today.
We’re Not Sure Who We Are, But We Have “Values”
As Long as Our Employees Honor These Values We Can Do Anything.
Confusion! Corporate Assets are continually spent in an attempt to define the value concepts, while the company spends inordinate effort to examine all possibilities for growth.
Statements Might Restrict Our Options, So We Have None
We’ll Do Anything To: Make Money, Increase Market Share and/or Grow the Company
Desperation! Company Resources are poured into any possibility for growth.
A “mission” statement has a unique ability to focus the efforts of every employee in the company if and only if it is designed well and is implemented with a singular focus that places it above all the daily firefights at the company. Doing “good” in the typical employee’s day is insufficient for the firm to truly set itself apart from the rest of its competitors. What one employee believes is “good” may exactly counter the efforts of another employee’s interpretation of “good”. On even a small scale, this creates a situation where everyone is working extremely hard and yet the organization seems to achieve only average returns.
The Importance of Direction
An organization of people exists to accomplish what the individual cannot accomplish alone. The most pressing issue that develops as the organization grows is one of coordination. As was pointed out many years ago by Henry Mintzberg in his definitive book on structuring organizations, the issue of coordination is the continual struggle to get employee effort focused on the unique mission of the organization.
Once you have figured out what constitutes the competitive advantages for the organization, the implementation of that strategy (the competitive advantages) logically begins with a useful, focused mission (grounded in those advantages) that every individual in the company can use to make decisions. Well trained, motivated employees absent an effective unifying mission will head in the direction that “they” believe is the best for the company. This may or may not align with the focus of the top management team.
A Naval Ship vs. A Corporation
My father was a Navy ship commander in the Second World War. Once he received his orders, the entire crew was put to the task of attaining success in the mission. He depended upon each crew member being an expert in their particular task and yet he also depended upon all of them working together to accomplish the mission that he laid before them.
Imagine if you will the typical corporate scenario at play aboard this naval war ship. We don’t know exactly where we’re going, but we want to be very efficient. We hire good people and tell them to “do good”. Each area of the ship is concerned only with improving their own operations and arguing in meetings that their needs are supreme. Each area of the ship receives award after award for their outstanding performance, but the ship wanders the seas.
In a long history of looking at Mission Statements, researchers and practitioners have almost universally acknowledged the value of a singular mission as a driving force for companies and yet have been inconsistent in advising what a great mission statement might look like.
The culmination of all the studies completed in this area, along with almost 20 years of assisting companies design effective mission statements has led me to the development of a 5-point approach to creating an effective mission statement. These five points should drive the “art” of designing a quality statement.
The Five Keys to Designing a Mission Statement
Short – Does it fit on a coffee mug?
Simple – Something that everyone in the company can learn and understand.
Directional - Guides every individual in the company every day.
Actionable - Tells everyone exactly what the company does and what it does not do.
Measurable - Must be able to develop a metric for every part of the statement.
Remember: It is not that the cats are doing anything inherently wrong, they are just being cats and they will not get to any “end” as a group unless they are given a goal, a reason, and a reward.
