Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It...

“Our mission is to delight our customers as the number one technology driven global manufacturer and marketer of value differentiated XYZ products and services. We will strengthen our leadership position through a shared-value culture of employee involvement where an intense focus on continuous improvement delivers shareholder value in everything we do.”

In the last LinkedIn article I published, Mission Accepted? Mission Accomplished?, I painted a picture of a mission statement full of big words, printed on fancy paper and mounted in an expensive frame, hanging on the wall in the front lobby of most organizations. Then I challenged anyone reading to consider whether or not anyone other than the first time guest at the location ever paid any attention at all to what it actually said…

The one I sanitized and shared above was not only hanging in one of those really nice frames, it was printed on the back of everyone employee’s ID badge they used to clock in and out on a daily basis. And guess how much attention anyone gave that… While they may have looked at it more often than the one hanging in the lobby, I’d bet they were far less familiar with what it said than they were with the color of shirt they were wearing when the picture was taken for the front of the badge!

Now before you accuse me of bashing the employees for being disconnected or uncommitted to their organization’s stated purpose for operating, let’s actually consider what it says…

At face value, it certainly sounds like that company was a big deal. But if we really need to make the rubber meet the road, what does all that even mean? “Delight our customers” sounds nice enough, but would that tell you anything at all about how what you do on a daily basis ties into that if you were part of that company? And the idea of “value differentiate” seems to imply something good, but it could just as easily mean they’re producing the cheapest thing they can get away with and still sell it as something decent… How about the end focus to “deliver shareholder value in everything we do”? It typically only took a few months of employment for most folks to realize that all spending on continuous improvement came to a screeching halt about three weeks into each new quarter with the primary focus for the remaining 9 or 10 weeks being on scraping by with no spending whatsoever so the earning report at the end of the quarter would look good…

To say there wasn’t much tying that mission statement to anything the majority of the several hundred team members did, or even considered doing, on a routine basis is a drastic understatement! But even with that fancy mission statement, clearly written by a whole team of attorneys (who likely never saw the inside of one the actual manufacturing facilities), it could have still made an impact if that “shared-value culture of employee involvement” was something more than words printed on the ID badges…

For the last twenty years, I’ve heard John Maxwell say over and over that “EVERYTHING rises and falls on leadership.” I’ve never heard him vary from that. I can’t think of a single time where he said “some things rise and fall on leadership” or “just a few things rise and fall on leadership” or even “in most cases, some things rise and fall on leadership”... He’s never qualified that statement. And he’s never wavered in the importance he places on effective leadership!

Over the next few posts, we’ll take a look at some things we can each do as leaders to ensure the teams we lead not only have a clear understanding of the mission our organization is working toward, we’ll dig into ways we can provide them with a visual example!