Previously I spoke of the essential and necessary commitment to a process improvement program, be it facilitated by outside consulting or as part of an internal group: Commitment to change!
While what I am going to describe is not guaranteed to get the undying support needed, using certain techniques at the onset of the approach may strengthen the probability of commitment from the CEO or CIO as well as establishing a “thinking” Sr. Management team. All this for the price of a nice dinner with a reasonable bottle of wine for a few friends!
The activity is the establishment of the Vision and Mission statement for the organization and ensuring that they are clearly defined and understood. "Wait!", he/she says, "Don’t we already have those? Haven’t we been working for all those years looking at the company slogans on our internal portal? Seems like a waste of time to me!" Does it? Here’s a quick test: Perform one-on-one interviews, back to back, with the members of the Sr. Management team, as well as the CEO, and ask these questions:
- What is the vision statement for the organization?
- What does the vision statement mean to you?
- What is the mission statement for the organization?
- What does the mission statement mean to you?
Possible outcomes:
- Each and every interview results in a rock solid shared understanding and meaning of the Vision and Mission statements.
- The number of definitions and understanding of the statements are different for each interview! This assumes everyone can recite the vision and mission statements!! This assumes the organization even has them!!!
- Some variation of #2.
OK, so what does it mean? Clearly, if the outcome of your work is that everyone can recite and has a shared understanding of them then you can move on to the next steps of the assessment. But, and this is where the majority of us will find ourselves, if the result is anything else then there is one very important indicator here:
If the Sr. Management team does not unanimously understand the Vision and Mission and what it means to their respective responsibilities… how can anyone expect that the organization is succeeding at driving to the same goals? How many cooks are in the kitchen?
