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Defining Your Mission Compels Peak Performance
(Get Out Your Crayons)
By Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden
Indulge us, please, while we rant and rave for a minute, but when it comes to defining our organization's mission, this is an area where most of us manager-types have just plain done a miserable job.
Worse by far than just failing to communicate with our workforce about the organization's ultimate ambition and direction, we have managed to thoroughly confuse and mislead people about why the organization exists, and where it's headed. How?
By allowing well intentioned but misguided folk to turn what once may have been a pretty clear signal about the organization's desired future state into a raft of slogans, banners, buzzwords, t-shirts, and wall plaques... "mission flatulence" if you will. That's right, hype, noise.
If you at all doubt what we're saying, start taking note of all the plaques and banners proclaiming a "mission" you see when you enter a place of business - any business. Do it at your own business. For that matter, start at home in your closet, and pull out all those promotional t-shirts proclaiming job 1, mission 1, what our team stands for, and the like. Bet you've got enough stuff there to reclothe the next small town that gets wiped out by a flood. Actually, what are you still doing with that stuff?
In essence, what we've done is confuse a mission statement (something anybody with a sixth grade education can create in less than 5 minutes) with a 'sense of mission,' which can require an entire lifetime of daily reinforcement.
Entire lifetime?! Why bother? Because having a sense of mission to which one is absolutely Committed is an extremely powerful motivator. Without it, people are just along for the ride. In his 1986 book, Peak Performers, Charles Garfield did a masterful job of explaining how "motivation through mission" has worked for astronauts, Olympic athletes, and yes, regular folks. When you think about it, Garfield is dead right. Every single instance of high achievement in the history of mankind has been accompanied by someone being Committed (in a big way) to a mission!
What else could have caused astronaut Alan Shepherd to strap his butt to a relatively untested rocket, Christopher Columbus to sail off the edge of the known earth, or Martin Luther King, Jr. to march into Selma? It sure wasn't the pay! No, Garfield's advice is even more relevant now than it was then. Get the book and read it!
Many of us seem to have completely underestimated the degree of cynicism with which people tend to regard our efforts to communicate this mission thing. "Why would people be cynical" you ask? For starters, how about the fact that some organizations seem compelled to change their "mission" about once a quarter.
Others can't quite seem to match the words with the deeds. And then there's all those posters, plaques, and stuff... End of rant.
Often, when we're speaking at a corporate event or conducting a training session, we'll see one of the aforementioned banners, plaques, or posters proclaiming the company's mission. Do you think their people can recite the mission statement? Who cares? Here's what we think is a better barometer of your success in creating a sense of mission. We've issued the following challenge to these clients, and would issue the same to you.
For the next class of new recruits you bring in, shield them from any verbal manifestations of the esteemed "mission statement". Make darn sure none of their eyes or ears come in contact with its words, from any source, for a period of three months. At the end of that time, after they've had a chance to get to know your company and its leaders, ask them "What is this company all about?" Their answer will tell you all you need to know.
So what are the essentials of motivation through mission, and where are the "better practices" you ask... who has or is getting it right?
Clarity. In its earliest days FedEx, or Federal Express as it was known then, didn't have a lot going for it. The company had very little money, and even less time. As an early proponent of airline deregulation, they didn't even have many friends.
What they did have, though was a couple thousand people with a warrior spirit who would rather fall on their swords than be responsible for missing a commitment (there goes that word again) to a customer... people who had bought in to the "absolutely, positively overnight" thing well before Vince Fagan and Carl Allie put the words on television.
The FedEx example bears mentioning because it illustrates one of the essential ingredients of achieving a true sense of mission... clarity. They hadn't declared that they would 'try' to do something, or that something was 'job 1' or 'priority 1.' There was no ambiguity or 'wiggle room' to it whatsoever. No, what had been spoken and accepted was this notion that, against some very long odds, they were going to do something that no one else at the time was capable of doing, namely pick your stuff up today, and deliver it somewhere else absolutely, positively overnight - no matter what.
Boldness. On the premise that modest achievement isn't terribly energizing or memorable, a mission must also be bold if it is to inspire peak performance. To be sure, we can't all commit the nation to a successful lunar mission as President Kennedy did in 1961, or predict Superbowl victories like former NFL coach Jimmy Johnson, but if we are to inspire greatness, we must somehow get people to 'hitch their wagon' to something big - credible, but big, bold, graphic, and compelling.
Most organizations attempt to do this through fairly casual use of terms like 'best', 'biggest', 'first', and 'number 1'. That's all well and good except for one thing - If you ask ten people what 'best' or 'first' means, you'll likely get at least nine different answers. Somehow, we've got to get beyond those terms and paint a picture for them in broad, colorful strokes.
Say it with Constancy and Crayons. Far more important than any amount of wordsmithing is the process of ensuring that everyone in the organization understands and can associate with where the organization is headed. By his own admission, former Johnson & Johnson CEO, Jim Burke used to spend roughly 40% of his time communicating the J&J Credo, a statement of the organization's mission, purpose, and guiding principles. Burke clearly understood that one of the filters people use to judge our sincerity is how the message changes, and whether or not it is borne out by our actions.
In his best selling book, Beating the Street, former Fidelity Magellan fund manager, Peter Lynch admonishes investors not to invest in anything that "cannot be explained with a crayon." We would do well as leaders to use those very same crayons (literally) in explaining to our people what the organization stands for and where it is headed.
If you won't do the crayon thing (and we're serious in encouraging you to do so), at the very least, do this assignment. Right now, write down, from your perspective, your organization's top 3 priorities. Then walk outside your office and randomly pick 4 or 5 others with whom you work. Individually, ask them the same question. If there's not a lot of consistency in the answers, somebody's got some work to do. And you may as well start with you.
Please print the following attribution for this article: Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, co-authors of Contented Cows Give Better Milk, help clients clobber the competition by having a focused, fired up, and capably led workforce. They deliver powerful conference keynotes and leadership training. They can be reached at 800-940-7006 (+1-904-720-0870 from outside North America) or www.ContentedCows.com.