Aligning Individual Performance with Your Mission and Vision

In most organizations, the mission and vision have little to do with what gets done day-to-day. Even if employees know what the mission and vision are—and very few do—they fail to see how their work contributes to achieving them. Instead, departments, teams, and individuals focus on different things, on what the boss tells them is important or the company decides to target that year or the latest problem needing to be fixed. Rather than pulling together toward shared goals, they are pulled apart by shifting priorities and diverging objectives.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients is how well they align people, plans, and processes with the mission and vision of the organization. Every department, team, and individual not only knows what the mission and vision are, but they also understand what they must do to support them. The connection between an employee’s work and the mission and vision of his/her organization is documented and measurable.

Poudre Valley Health System, which won the Baldrige Award in 2008, calls this its “Global Path to Success.” Like other Award recipients, it uses its strategic plan and balanced scorecard to cascade its vision, mission, values, and strategic objectives throughout the organization, as shown in its award application summary:

According to PVHS, the Global Path to Success “provides a leadership system and framework for this culture, incorporating: (1) the performance management system, which links individual goals to organizational goals through each employee’s personal goal card; and (2) the Code of Conduct, Behavior Standards, and Leadership…

Why Organizations Fail

In a 2004 speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Russell Ackoff told a story about an operations researcher at General Electric who was asked by the CEO to evaluate GE’s corporate objectives. He took a list of the company’s stated objectives, which sound like most organizations’ objectives, and compared them to corporate decisions for the last five years.

Every decision violated one or more of the stated objectives.

He then evaluated the decisions to see if he could figure out what objectives they served and he found that 92% of the decisions supported one objective: To maximize the wealth, security, and quality of life of the people who made the decisions.

If you think such behavior is limited to the business world, think again. Ackoff, who was a professor at Penn, was so bored at faculty meetings that he documented what they discussed for two years. The word “student” was mentioned once. According to Ackoff, “Teaching is the price the faculty must pay for the quality of life it wants.” He adds: “If you think this or any other university is dedicated to teaching students, you’re wrong. It’s about maximizing the quality of life of the faculty.”

Who does your organization serve?

To transform your organization, you must understand what the organization is pursuing, not what it says it’s pursuing, change those objectives, and design a new system to meet them. Ackoff quotes Peter Drucker, who said, “There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right things.”

If you do the wrong things…