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Many companies have, at one time or another, contemplated their purpose and presented a mission or a set of corporate values. Sometimes, this is merely a cosmetic exercise. The true challenge is to define a coherent mission and to make it reach every nook and cranny of the company, so that each and every employee lives it in practice, day in and day out.

Ever since the military term “strategy” entered the business world lexicon, considerable attention has been paid to different methods of deployment and implementation. From planning in the 1970s, to the analytical models of the 80s and the reengineering of the 90s, or more recently, the “balanced scorecard” model, the objective has been to create “organizations focused on strategy.”

However, experience shows that when focus is placed entirely on that aspect, the mission (the company’s purpose) is relegated to a secondary plane, at the mercy of intuition and the good example set by the company’s leader. Actually, there are scarcely few management tools for molding “organizations focused on the mission.”

The first step of the method is to design a mission that is consistent with the desired company model. MbM defines mission as “the contribution identifying a group or organization.” Some companies define themselves in terms of “position”: to be the number-one company in a particular sector, the best, etc. This would be the first mistake to avoid. The mission is a contribution, not a positioning. Ambition is important, but the mission must be the contribution that gives meaning to the objective: Why do we want to be number one in the sector?

In practice, the most common form of self-defining is to consider the needs of the company’s various stakeholders, i.e., shareholders, customers and employees. The mission must also be accompanied by a set of values: criteria or forms of interpreting reality, which in time will become a way of being and acting. The mission is the “why” and the values are the “how.”

The next step is deployment. We have defined and successfully tested the “mission org chart,” a map that reveals the way different areas contribute to the achievement of the company’s mission (which we define as “shared missions”). Lastly, the company must ensure the progress of all aspects of the mission, thus a set of indicators for the mission are put in place, which are in line with the objectives. Each aspect of the mission should have objectives and must be measurable using specific indicators. If not, that aspect of the mission will be dead in the water. Meanwhile, each objective must relate to an aspect of the mission. If not, they would be blind objectives.

Designing a mission and implementing it with specific management and evaluation tools is not enough. The meaning of the mission comes from the conduct of the company’s leaders. There are historic cases of leadership, such as David Packard (HP) or Tom Watson (IBM), who achieved equally exceptional results thanks to their extraordinary aptitude and personal values. In MbM, leadership is critical, but it does not require people who are absolutely extraordinary and have exceptional qualities for being effective leaders. It is enough to have a certain amount of leadership potential and stick to the methodology. It is fundamentally about having leadership that focuses on the mission. It is not about being a visionary or charismatic leader: that leader just needs to be true to the mission and serve the people of his or her team so that they can carry out that mission in the best way possible.

Applying MbM generates a cultural change within the company similar to that achieved with the transition from “top-down management” to management by objectives. When we stop giving employees tasks and instead assign them objectives, that is when empowerment occurs. Likewise, when we give meaning to those objectives, when the leader is capable of conveying the company mission to the employees, it turns into a process the authors refer to as ownership. The employee identifies with and commits to the purpose and values of the company.

The leader must be the facilitator, the common thread in this process of change. It is for this reason that MbM is applied in a cascade from the top down. There are several basic keys to effective leadership. The first of these is commitment: MbM depends on the leader accepting and undertaking the mission at a personal level, becoming fully committed. The manager must instill in the employees a sense of urgency to complete the mission, and perseverance so that the efforts devoted to the cause are not diluted over time. All of the employees may not embrace the mission from the outset, and only a consistent leader will get everyone on board for the project, turning commitment to the mission into an unwritten rule, into a necessary condition for being part of the company.

Cooperation between departments, a central issue in many issues, is another of the keys to MbM. For this, the methodology makes things fairly easy. In general, the lack of cooperation is easily explained by the shortage of reasons for cooperating: individual objectives do not inspire it. MbM, with its mission and shared missions, solves the root problem by pointing all of the departments in the same direction. The leader need only make sure that the directors or department managers are not just evaluated by their direct contribution to the mission, but also for their indirect help in cooperating with other departments.

Finally, it must not be forgotten that a mission, whatever it may be, requires specific skills which must be acquired by the individuals who carry it out. The greater the ability, the greater the potential. Thus leaders must be responsible for enhancing the talents of their employees through coaching, or development support. Their attitude regarding personal growth must always be positive and they should always be able to make time in their schedule for this. It is not about promoting purely technical exercises in order to develop a particular skill. They should always be in the middle of the action. At a company focused on its mission, individuals come first. And with MbM, coaching needs to be an activity fundamentally designed by and for the people.

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