Organisation Mission
"Our mission is to provide outstanding service to our customers."
"Our intent is to be the best DAAT in England."
"We stand for quality."
BIG DEAL!
Of the countless hours many organisations spend on mission statements, most are wasted. The result is a set of stale words and expressions that lose zest each time they are repeated. The search for just the right words seems invariably to end up with the same words. Some defend the quest, saying that it's the process that counts. One can only hope so, since the content is so thin.
On the one hand, these mission statements are too general and generic. What does "outstanding service" mean in your particular business? What is it that defines "the best" from the second best? And just what constitutes the "quality" that you stand for?
Beyond the lack of specificity is the lack of translatability-in the sense of taking the mission off the printed page. For this to happen, the focus shifts from whether people understand the mission to whether they know how to express it. Missions too often are created and remain as a staff function, often in a planning, quality assurance or human resource department. They belong as a line function, and they must go deep.
For example, in a bank, the real key is not that the senior vice president understands the mission; it is whether each bank clerk understands and believes it. Among other reasons, bank clerks interact with far more customers.
This principle similarly holds for social service organisations, where the test might be whether or not the child care worker on the third shift on Saturday night lives the organisations' mission.
For missions to be effective, they need to move not only from generic to tailored form but from statements of attitude and philosophy to descriptors of behavior. The appropriate place for the mission is not in the plastic card in the pocket-it is in the head and guts of the employee. The question is not whether the employee can recite the mission statement. The question is whether they can give an example of how the mission has animated and influenced their behavior in the past two days.
Missions That Matter
The best mission statements define the company in terms of core business, often with strong comparative advantage. For example: "Changing the Odds" as the mission of the New York State Department of Parole reshaped the agency from a focus on monitoring released inmates to the business not only of preventing recidivism, but of changing the factors that create the low odds that a former prisoner will make it in the outside world.
Clear mission alone is obviously not an insurance policy for sustained profitability. But it is one indispensable starting point.
Missions come in three varieties:
1. Definition by who you are
2. Definition by what you do
3. Definition by what you achieve
Definition by accomplishment overcomes the self-centering trend of most missions to point to the burdens organisational staff carry. They shift the focus to what happens for customers, including those internal to the setting.
Viewing Visions
Visions go beyond an enterprise to look at what should be different in the external environment. At their best they challenge the distance between present and desired conditions.
"We envision a school catchment area in which each student, every day, wants to come to their school."
"We see a community with absolutely no unwanted teen pregnancy."
Without vision, the organisation may not perish, but it will not have a bar for accomplishment that goes beyond financial performance. Historically, those companies that have been most profitable and most productive (excluding those in both private and public sector with protected markets) are those whose vision is socially as well as economically constructive.
For missions and visions, many believe that the best statements are collectively constructed. Effective practice does not support this belief. The best visions often come from one or several pairs of eyes looking distinctively at something ahead. From Jesus to Gandhi to Henry Ford, visions often come from a leader.
Beliefs at Bedrock
Beliefs are the foundation for both mission and vision, as well as the key to integrating what we think and what we do. Without beliefs, there is no way to link corporate focus to personal energy. Beliefs go to character.
We look to character in people as a way of predicting how they will behave when the going gets tough. Will they repay the loan regardless of circumstances? Will they take personal responsibility or blame others? Character is core. Is it fair to seek it in organisations as well as in individuals? Yes! But you will not always find it. Many organisations have characteristics. Far fewer have character.
Some not only have character but tell you what it is and invite your scrutiny as to how well they live up to it. An impressive non-profit organisation serving persons with a disability states that "we are relentlessly optimistic for the growth of the people we serve. We do not advance financial constraints as an acceptable reason for falling short." Most non-profits believe that if government does not give the money, they cannot open another group home to serve those in desperate need. Not this one!
Beliefs in for-profit companies are equally impressive. In its strategic plan, one large bank speaks of the belief that its customers and its staff should actively choose it, not simply get there and stay there as a path of least resistance.
You are not well served to look for character in a company's advertising slogans, especially if externally created. A much better way to seek it is to look at return and warranty policies - both in writing and in practice. In many instances, we see that the return is for 60 days under specified limits. We get a sense that while we can take it back that we will face at least mild barriers in doing so.
Beliefs run deeper than we think. For example, many companies that hedge on a warranty or return policy do so out of a belief about human nature. They believe that many, if not most people, will take advantage of them if given half the chance. Companies who do not hedge on returns tend to believe that most people are basically honest and will honor some reasonable level of trust.
Missions, visions, beliefs are not another fad or fancy. They are here to stay. But presence is not enough. The critical fact is not whether an organisation has a mission statement. The question is whether it matters to everyone in that organisation.
