Excellence University Journal

“Planting” an Excellence Tree: A Critical Step in Living a Mission Statement

by Dr. Brian Higley

November 1st, 2008

To return to descriptions of all 6 steps toward Mission Activation, click here.

Living a mission statement requires an Activated Mission.  The metaphor of an “Excellence Tree” was designed to help promote Mission Activation.  Here are the four phases of “Mission Activation Step 2: “Planting an Excellence Tree” the second step to consider when attempting to actually live a mission statement:

A) Identification of “mission-aligned” primary objectives is the first phase of Planting the Tree.  In order to see more Mission Activation, everyone needs to know (and agree, at least to a certain extent) that objectives such as “Increase financial profits by 10% this quarter” or “Promote a culture of excellence and satisfaction throughout the team,” or “Recruit and train the best people,” etc. are the most important ways in which to spend time, money, and energy.  Primary objective clarification often plays a key role in helping teams stay motivated to live their mission on a daily basis.  If people know why they are being asked to do something (e.g., “because it helps us accomplish Primary Objective #1 – and because Primary Objective #1 helps fulfill mission in this way . . ., “), they tend to have a stronger commitment to doing what they are asked to do at a high level of quality.  At our firm we call this process “Mission Connection;” getting ourselves and others strongly connected with our Mission by being able to answer all “why should I do this?” questions with “because it helps our mission stay activated — and here’s how. . . ”

B) Prioritization of primary objectives is another critical phase in the planting of an Excellence Tree.  After identifying primary objectives, the following questions often need to be answered: “Which is the most important objective?” and  “Which is the least important one — the objective that we can expect to focus on less when time, energy, and/or revenue is short?”  These are tough questions to answer; I know from experience how easy it can be to say, “ALL of them are equally important — let’s focus on all of them equally!”  However, I’ve learned (the hard way) that failing to prioritize communicates to everyone that nothing is a priority -0 and this is a great way to “drown the tree” in a tide of frenzied activity, quickly killing Mission Activation.  If no one is very clear about what is most important, people are forced to simply guess what to do now and what to place on the back-burner when time or energy is short — or, even worse, burn themselves out pursuing goals that are not as important as other, more strongly mission-aligned goals.  This guesswork can lead to teams spending time and energy in places that are not as critical to the team’s mission; clearly prioritized primary objectives can help teams to avoid this tremendously harmful guessing game.

C) Creation and prioritization of “objective-aligned” SMART Goals, the next phase in the Excellence Tree planting process, helps teams to track primary objective-related progress in clear, measurable, consistent ways.  To avoid frenzied mindsets (and the often huge amounts of wasted time, energy, and money that are associated with them), we have found that it is critical to create and prioritize SMART Goals — Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-bound goals that clarify the path toward achieving primary objectives.  We have found three important things related to this phase of planting an Excellence Tree:

1. that addressing this phase in a quality way is an extremely powerful mechanism of clarifying the path toward Mission Activation
2. that many people “know” about the power of SMART Goals, but rarely “do” SMART Goal development (click here for research on why we often don’t do what we know)
3. that many skip doing this because they are not fully aware of the truly devastating impact of failing to address this critical aspect of Mission Activation.

Our team has found that failure to address this phase in a quality way is the number 1 reason why missions are so often left unactivated.  If your mission seems as though it is not activated, odds are that a major part of the problem lies within this phase.  Click here for more on how to develop truly SMART Goals.

D) Distribution of these SMART Goals to the “right people” is the last phase involved in the planting of an Excellence Tree.  Who are the right people to give SMART Goals to?  Is it best to give them to the smartest people, the people with the most seniority, the people with the most impressive titles?  Our answer is simple, but powerful: give SMART Goals to team members who are most likely to achieve these goals in quality ways on (or before) deadline.  This probably sounds like common sense to most, but this is not common practice, in our experience!

The high performance teams that we have encountered know the value of giving specific SMART Goals to the right people as often as possible (regardless of titles, degrees,seniority, etc.); people who are truly able to achieve their goals at a high level of quality on a regular basis on (or before) deadline.  Jim Collins, in his classic book Good to Great, identifies “3 Circles” of greatness: passion, excellence, and need.  I often talk about distributing SMART Goals in a “3 Circle Way” — goal distribution that is based on how passionate someone is about achieving the goal, how much excellence (training and aptitude) a person has to achieve it, and how well aligned the goal is with the mission (or the “need” for the goal in relation to the mission).  We have found that teams that do not pay enough attention to distributing their goals in ways that keep people within their 3 Circles as much as possible —  including tracking how well these goals are achieved to validate the 3 Circle nature of each goal — tend to struggle with Mission Activation.

To return to descriptions of all 6 steps toward Mission Activation, click here.

Article Filed under: I. WATER (Team/Group Excellence)