A mason was asked “what are you doing?” He said “can’t you see I am chipping stone” and carried on hammering in a lacklustre way. When asked the same question, another mason replied “I am building a cathedral” and continued hammering joyfully away.
I have always been a little sceptical of this story. It sounds like leadership-training, mythical hooee. But it turns out I have been horribly misguided. Its all about Personal Mission Statement. And the principle makes all the difference. Even to workers sorting tomatoes. In my defence however, there is more to setting a Personal Mission Statement than having a catchy response to the question “what are you doing?”.
Personal Mission Statement supports internal motivation in teams
For work to be internally motivating J Richard Hackman suggests the Personal Mission Statement should conform to three criteria:
- It must be meaningful. The work must be significant, clearly identified and involve a variety of skills.
- The work must engage the person’s responsibility which you can do by giving them autonomy.
- There must be a feedback mechanism built into the task, to give the person knowledge of the results they are creating.
Internal motivation through the development of a Personal Mission Statement is taken a step further at Morning Star. People doing the work negotiate their deliverables with the person for whom they are doing the work. The outcome of these negotiations is documented in what they call a Client Letter of Understanding or CLOU.
The process begins with each person in the company creating or reviewing their personal commercial mission.
The activity of the person sorting tomatoes at Morning Star is ‘to remove the bad tomatoes’. Pretty obvious! However the Personal Mission Statement of the sorters is to “Ensure our customers receive pristine tomato products free from foreign material”. The difference is clear.
A good Personal Mission Statement is structured in a specific way
The Personal Mission Statement:
- Is positive rather than negative.
- Focusses on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.
- Ties the actions to the mission of the enterprise, which is “to produce tomato products which consistently achieve the product and service expectation of our customer in a cost effective, environmentally responsible manner”.
- Compels staff to think more broadly about what they are doing, perhaps evaluating the work of others around them.
- Requires thinking at a higher level evaluating their actions against more meaningful structures.
- Requires a shift of mind-set from ‘being employed to do a job’ to ‘being an internal consultant’ who is there to complete an outcome, negotiated with others inside and outside of the organisation.
Once each person has a Personal Commercial mission they:
- Define the deliverables and tasks required to fulfil this mission.
- Negotiate their actions with the people for whom they create deliverables.
- Define the lag measures by which he actions will be measured as well as lead measures by which they can bootstrap themselves to higher levels of performance.
- Define their personal development goals. The areas in which they are going to improve in the coming year. As a supplier there may be obvious areas where someone can improve their offer but also as a client there may be areas in which someone can learn in order to fully appreciate what they receive from suppliers.
Personal Mission Statement leads to Team Mission Statement
When teams and individuals have a clear understanding of their Personal Mission Statement they can compare this with the people for whom they deliver. There is an excellent exercise I use in workshops to stimulate this process. Participating teams use their Personal Mission Statements to agree a Team Mission Statement. They then engage in intense discussion with their counterparts, about what they deliver and what they receive.
Staff at Morning Star monitor and manage the implementation of the agreed activities themselves. They deal with anomalies and exceptions through a well-defined process for reaching agreement. Effective team meetings can have high impact. Early morning team meetings can set the tone for the day and weekly delivery meetings and ratchet the process of delivery and change.
Self-management is not a soft option by any means. However there are many advantages, material for a following posting. And the Personal Commercial Mission statement is a good way to initiate the thinking required for members in organisations to begin to take ownership of their delivery, their careers, even their lives.
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