When employees don’t seem committed to the success of the business, are prompt to end the workday and aren’t emotionally engaged, a common cause is a lack of a clear mission. A mission defines why your organization exists, whom you serve and the result of what you do. But too few of us notice one aspect of great missions—the people.
Do you have a mission? If you do, then do all of your people fully understand it? Your board, owners, leaders and employees should read your mission and say, “I’m proud to be a part of that.”
Analyze the four facets of a mission, and you’ll notice they all tie to people:
- There are the people sending
- There are the people sent
- There are the people being sent to
- There is a value being created for all three of these groups
I use a simple formula to help organizations build an initial version of their missions. Just fill in the blanks:
We work with _____ who want to _____.
And we work with _____ who want to _____.
The above focuses on the two most important questions for every organization: “who is your customer?” and “what does your customer value?”
Peter Drucker, who popularized the concept of a mission, was wont to say, “Your mission should fit on a T-shirt.” Your vision could be pages long of what you aim for in the future, but the mission is here and now.
An exercise to infuse more “people” into your mission is to think of the stakeholders of your enterprise. I call them the Three Cs:
- Conservators: the leaders, owners and managers
- Customers: those who buy your offerings
- Internal customers: your employees
The conservators have an obligation to create jobs and a workplace that allow for attracting and keeping the best talent. To not do so is to abandon the responsibility of fostering a healthy workplace and culture, which ultimately hurts fellow conservators, owners, investors and eventually customers.
Customers buy your offerings for a fair price you’ve thoughtfully set. Pricing is the mechanism by which a firm extracts a portion of the value it creates with its customers.
So, you must clearly communicate the value you deliver and your margins to customers and conservators, respectively. Also, clearly communicate the value you deliver in the workplace to internal customers. If these communications fall short, then performance suffers.
It sounds so basic, yet most companies have significant gaps in sharing and clarifying their missions.
