Righttrack Whispers: Values, visions and missions – time well spent, or a cause of derision?

by Derek West

Five indicators that there are big corporate problems just around the corner:

Your company has just won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise
Your chairman or CEO is given a knighthood
You open a lavish new head office in the middle of London
(even though your workforce are all in Swindon)
Tom Peters cites you as an ‘Excellent’ company, in his new bestseller “Recycling the Idea”
Your senior executives launch the new corporate Values, Vision and Mission Statement
– having devoted all of the previous year to concocting it.

When did organisations collectively decide that they all had to have Values, Vision and Mission Statements? Who are they for? Is it the employees, who are often unaware (or openly derisive) of them? Is it for customers, or shareholders, who are indifferent to them? Or maybe for the senior execs themselves, to give them reassurance that the stormy waters of corporate life can be calmed with a little rhetorical oil.

Why are we so sceptical and cynical about company values, visions and missions? I think there are two main reasons.

Firstly, the sometimes glaring disparity between the lofty sentiments expressed in such statements, and the reality of corporate behaviour. Enron (company motto “Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence) had a ‘Vision and Values’ statement that declared ‘We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves…we do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don’t belong here’. The last sentence is especially interesting – not a sentiment that organisations usually feel the need to express, yet Enron was exactly the place where these things did belong! If you look up the mission statements of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Woolworths, RBS – all on the eve of their demise – you will find identikit references to ‘customer experience’, ‘delivering efficiency’, ‘unleashing employee potential’ and such.

Secondly, perhaps as a result of this phenomenon, mass media – and particularly the internet – has generated a huge industry of corporate mockery, such as Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons, ‘The Office’ (UK and US versions), the movie ‘Office Space’, and thousands of websites and blogs lampooning the quirks and horrors of corporate life. And V,V&M statements are deservedly in the front line to suffer just such punishment. If you search for ‘mission statement’ on the Dilbert website, you will find over fifty delightfully scathing cartoons – or you can find many excellent ‘mission statement generators’ which will automatically produce a suitably platitudinous spoonful of drivel, indistinguishable from the real thing. I have just used one which gave me ‘Our efforts involve achieving the highest quality staff development with awareness of professionalism at all levels’. Not bad for a first attempt!

So what can we do? Here’s a simple 5-point programme to ensure that your vision and mission will mean something, and will actually help to shape how your organisation performs.

1. Work as a team to create a mission statement that is meaningful, and realistic but aspirational. Ask yourselves – will this statement get people out of bed in the morning with the genuine belief that they can achieve it. Probably the best example of this was President Kennedy’s pledge, in 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” In 1961, with the US losing the space race, this was hugely aspirational: but it got a lot of people out of bed for a long time, and (unless you believe the conspiracy theorists!) it was realistic, because it actually happened!

2. Think of this mission as the end point of your journey. This means that you need to define your timescales. How long will this mission take to achieve? Realistically, most large transformations take at least 2-4 years. Any less, and the changes won’t be thorough; any more, and the people involved lose commitment.

3. Think about your journey towards your new mission as one giant project. What are the workstreams that need to be put in place. Think of the 4 to 6 most urgent areas of work – maybe start with a simple view of an organisation – people, process, technology say – and then adapt it to your particular circumstances.

4. Within each one of these workstreams, and over the timescale you have set yourself, think about the things that need to be achieved on the journey. These are big areas of achievement, and each one might be one or several projects in its own right. “Astronauts trained” – “Mission control built” – “Rocket constructed”. Plot them on your journey.

5. Take a step back and ask yourself: do all of these deliverables actually contribute to the achievement of our mission? If not, remove them. Even if they are there because ‘we have always done things that way’, have the courage to sweep them aside.

Finally, having decided what your mission is, the length of the journey, the big areas that need to change, and the deliverables that will really help you to achieve it, do the most important thing of all: communicate it to the rest of your organisation, and demonstrate your commitment to it by asking, at each decision point: ‘how will this achieve our mission?’.

So there you have it. I hope you have enjoyed this Trainer’s Tip, "...which has consistently striven to provide excellence and improved stakeholder value through its focus on delivering its core values at the heart of our community."