Developing Mission, Vision, and Values
Mission and Vision in the P-O-L-C Framework
Mission, Vision, and Leading
Leading involves influencing others toward the attainment of organizational objectives. Leading and leadership are nearly synonymous with the notions of mission and vision. We might describe a very purposeful person as being "on a mission". As an example, Steve Demos had the personal mission of replacing cow's milk with soy milk in U.S. supermarkets, and this mission led to his vision for, and strategy behind, the firm White Wave and its Silk line of soy milk products. Similarly, we typically think of some individuals as leaders because they are visionary. For instance, when Walt Disney suggested building a theme park in a Florida swamp back in the early 1960s, few other people in the world seemed to share his view.
Any task - whether launching Silk or building the Disney empire - is that much more difficult if attempted alone. Therefore, the more that a mission or vision challenges the status quo - and recognizing that good vision statements always need to create some dissonance with the status quo - the greater will be the organization's need of what leadership researcher Shiba calls "real change leaders" - people who will help diffuse the revolutionary philosophy even while the leader (i.e., the founder or CEO) is not present. Without real change leaders, a revolutionary vision would remain a mere idea of the visionary CEO - they are the ones who make the implementation of the transformation real.
In most cases where we think of revolutionary companies, we associate the organization's vision with its leader - for instance, Apple and Steve Jobs, Dell and Michael Dell, or Google with the team of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Most important, in all three of these organizations, the leaders focused on creating an organization with a noble mission that enabled the employees and management team to achieve not only the strategic breakthrough but to also realize their personal dreams in the process. Speaking to the larger relationship between mission, vision, strategy, and leadership, are the Eight principles of visionary leadership, derived from Shiba's 2001 book, Four Practical Revolutions in Management.
Eight Principles of Visionary Leadership
- Principle 1: The visionary leader must do on-site observation leading to personal perception of changes in societal values from an outsider's point of view.
- Principle 2: Even though there is resistance, never give up; squeeze the resistance between outside-in (i.e., customer or society-led) pressure in combination with top-down inside instruction.
- Principle 3: Revolution is begun with symbolic disruption of the old or traditional system through top-down efforts to create chaos within the organization.
- Principle 4: The direction of revolution is illustrated by a symbolically visible image and the visionary leader's symbolic behavior.
- Principle 5: Quickly establishing new physical, organizational, and behavioral systems is essential for successful revolution.
- Principle 6: Real change leaders are necessary to enable revolution.
- Principle 7: Create an innovative system to provide feedback from results.
- Principle 8: Create a daily operation system, including a new work structure, new approach to human capabilities, and improvement activities.
Vision That Pervades the Organization
A broader definition of visionary leadership suggests that, if many or most of an organization's employees understand and identify with the mission and vision, efficiency will increase because the organization's members "on the front lines" will be making decisions fully aligned with the organization's goals. Efficiency is achieved with limited hands-on supervision because the mission and vision serve as a form of cruise control. To make frontline responsibility effective, leadership must learn to trust workers and give them sufficient opportunities to develop quality decision-making skills.
The classic case about Johnsonville Sausage, recounted by CEO Ralph Stayer, documents how that company dramatically improved its fortunes after Stayer shared responsibility for the mission and vision, and ultimately development of the actual strategy, with all of his employees. His vision was the quest for an answer to "What Johnsonville would have to be to sell the most expensive sausage in the industry and still have the biggest market share?" Of course, he made other important changes as well, such as decentralizing decision making and tying individual's rewards to company-wide performance, but he initiated them by communicating the organization's mission and vision and letting his employees know that he believed they could make the choices and decisions needed to realize them.
Mission and vision are also relevant to leadership well beyond the impact of one or several top executives. Even beyond existing employees, various stakeholders - customers, suppliers, prospective new employees - are visiting organizations' Web sites to read their mission and vision statements. In the process, they are trying to understand what kind of organization they are reading about and what the organization's values and ethics are. Ultimately, they are seeking to determine whether the organization and what it stands for are a good fit for them.