In our book, Total Alignment, we have presented a systematic process for connecting the mission, vision and values to the activities of every job holder in the organization thus aligning their contributions with its intent.

Alignment is necessary if you are serious about reaching the high goals expressed in your mission and vision. Your mission and vision must not only be well-defined, but you need a process in place to close your mission gap and vision gap. What are these gaps? To clarify, let’s take a closer look at the definition of mission and vision.

Mission and vision

We define mission as the reason for existence. Your mission is the motivating force behind what you do. Your mission is your purpose. A worthwhile mission is one that serves others. Your vision, however, is the picture of your success in the future. It is the picture of success five to ten years out. Imagine it’s ten years from now, and you have succeeded in delivering your mission, what would that success look like? How would you describe it? Mission and vision each have an important yet distinct role to play.

We have often seen mission and vision statements that are overlapping. There is no need to state how successful you want to be in the mission statement, and there is no need to state what your business does in the vision statement. Both statements of mission and vision should be clear and inspiring for the workforce. Their value lies in their clarity and their ability to motivate your people.

What is vision gap?

Your company achieves its vision through the operation of your existing processes, such as the recruitment process, the training process, the sales process, the production process, the delivery process, the post delivery process, etc. With the right processes in place and adequate financial strength, achievement of vision is possible.

Often, vision statements are so audacious that existing processes, no matter how well executed, will fall short of delivering the intended results. If your vision statement implies doubling or tripling the size of your company, you will have to overcome the distance between what you can achieve through your existing processes and what your vision requires. This is what we call the vision gap. You overcome your vision gap through strategic initiatives that serve to create new processes. The following questions can help you determine the extent of your vision gap.

• What is the size limit that you can achieve through organic growth of your existing businesses to reach your vision for, say ten years, from now?
• What is the delta growth you will need to achieve to close the gap through in-organic growth?
• How will you finance your organic growth to achieve its limit?
• How will you finance your inorganic growth to close the gap?
• Closing the vision gap

To close the vision gap, you will need to consider both the organic growth and the inorganic growth. Here are some suggestions for reaching your vision through organic growth:

• Improve your main product, service or market technology to capture new customers, in current or new geographic markets.
• Improve a basket of products or services to introduce to existing and new geographic markets.
• Use synergistic strength among the basket of products or services to capture market share.
• Modify or develop new products/services into existing customer segments and later into new markets.

Here are some suggestions for closing the vision gap through inorganic growth:

• Acquire a major or equal competitor and apply your know-how to manage a larger organization. A merger could work also, provided you maintain control.
• Diversify with related new products or services in order to compete in selected segments of your business where growth has been slow. This can also improve sales of other segments of your business.
• Diversify with unrelated new products or services that serve your mission- targeting present customers with present distribution channels. You can augment sales with new products of cyclical sales patterns. This diversification can also increase revenue from your current products or services.
• Explore backward integration. In other words, move into an area that currently serves as your suppliers. Consider purchasing a supplier or establishing a subsidiary company. This strategy can also enhance your supply chain and improve the quality of raw materials or inputs into your production.
• Explore forward integration. In other words, enter into an area that is the customer of your products or services.
• Consider acquiring companies, establishing production facilities, wholesale systems or retail outlets. This strategy will enable you improve sales and increase stability in production by exercising greater control over marketing and better coordination between distribution channels and manufacturing.

What is the mission gap?

You are currently delivering your mission using today’s technology and infrastructure. Mission usually doesn’t change with time. When your vision window is five, ten or more years in the future, you will still be delivering your mission. However, as technology or infrastructure are bound to change, you might need to deliver your purpose in a different way. The difference between how you deliver your mission today versus in ten years is what we call the mission gap. For example, if you are in the retail business, most probably in ten years from now you will be selling to your customers through new channels and in a different way.

• Here are some questions to help you determine the extent of your mission gap:
• Will your mission still be understood and relevant ten years from now?
• Who will your customers be in ten years? What demographics & geography?
• How will your mission serve these customers in ten years?
• What products or services will deliver your mission to these customers in ten years using tomorrow’s technology, and how different will that be from today?
• How will these products or services be delivered to your customers in ten years using tomorrow’s infrastructure and how different will that be from today?
• How will you acquire or develop the needed technology?
• How will you acquire or develop the needed infrastructure?

Closing the mission gap

Closing the mission gap requires developing a new model for delivering your mission in ten years, a model that considers tomorrow’s technology and infrastructure. This will require you to be cognizant of the trends in technology and infrastructure and projections of your future customers’ demographics and consumption habits.

Mission and vision gaps in strategic planning process

While most companies have a mission and a vision, they are not at the center of those companies’ planning process and are consequently ignored. While the strategic planning emphasis is usually placed on growth, competitive strategy and on capturing new markets, few companies ascertain whether their strategy is adequate to deliver their vision. We strongly recommend adding the concept of closing the mission and vision gaps to your planning process. Not only will it increase the probability of success but will also serve as a key instrument for aligning your human talent on the road to success.

This article was originally published by Entrepreneur.com: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321515

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• Is your company fully in tune with its customer base?
• Are your internal processes delivering your value proposition with quality and speed?
• Are your people fully engaged in running the processes at optimum capacity?
• Are your top executives fully engaged in addressing the future needs of your customers?
• Are your top executives spending the majority of their time addressing the future?

These are some of the key elements of an aligned organization. How can you get there? Here are five steps to help you achieve alignment in your company or organization.

Step One – Develop a Clear, Unified Vision and Strategy

When the vision of a company is clear and unified, people will make their best effort to contribute to its achievement. When a creative strategy is in place, you have a roadmap to vision. With these two you have a solid foundation for alignment, the energy to move forward, and the inspiration for everyone to find a part to play.

Step Two – A Frame of Reference for Strategy Execution

Why is strategy execution a challenge for most organizations? There can be many reasons but here are a few of the most common: There are too many strategic initiatives. The initiatives don’t match up with the budget.  People don’t understand the strategy.

To make it possible to turn your vision into reality, establish a frame of reference. The framework we recommend is the ‘alignment map’. Draw a diagram with the vision in the center. Link your key performance indicators (KPIs) to the vision on one side and the strategic initiatives on the other. When this map is constructed, it can serve as a powerful instrument for aligning your organization, and a mechanism for strategy execution. These concepts have been developed in our book, Total Alignment.

Step Three – Establish Accountability through Individual Scorecards

Most business scorecards consolidate important financial information for the KPIs of a company. But establishing accountability requires a different kind of scorecard – one for each person. The individual scorecard should show the roles of direct impact, horizontal influence and management influence for each KPI from the alignment map as well as the assigned strategic initiatives that build your company’s future. A well-defined scorecard provides a clear and measurable focus for the job and a line of sight to vision and strategy.

Step Four – Sustain Alignment through Feedback Information

Managers need information to do their jobs. They need feedback on their own performance and information on the performance of the people they manage. Accurate and timely feedback enables managers to adjust course for themselves and for their people. Without feedback information, how can they stay aligned? How can they manage?

Step Five – Sustain Alignment through Management and Leadership

Management is improved when individual scorecards are in place and when feedback information is provided to each person. But, to sustain alignment, a leadership process is needed.

Leaders can sustain alignment by inspiring collaboration among people who tend to be focused on their own agendas and work within their silos. Leaders have the opportunity to help their team become more aware of cross-functional needs. Leadership involves breaking the silos. It requires empowering the workforce to make their own decisions. It involves helping people develop their capacity and compensating them for their real contribution.

These five steps are key to establishing and sustaining alignment in your company. They will help you transform your organizational culture over time. You will progress towards total alignment and will see the great results continue year after year. To learn more about implementing these five steps, go to our website, www.totalalignment.com.

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Being trustworthy

It’s important to start with the value of trust. Being trustworthy is what the word actually coveys, being worthy of someone’s trust. It means behaving consistently in a manner that attracts people’s trust in you. This is probably the greatest asset you could have. Why? Because with this value, your customers will trust you and buy more of what you are offering; your suppliers will trust you and give you their best; your employer and boss will trust you and empower you to act. Trustworthiness establishes a level of comfort between leaders and their team. If your team members and the others in the organization inherently trust you, they will be more motivated to follow your lead and this will, of course, benefit the corporation.

Being customer oriented

Creating a culture of being ‘customer oriented’ is an important key to the success of any business. But what does it mean? It means knowing your customers so well that you understand their needs and their pains. It means empathizing with their pains, being concerned about their wellbeing and striving to serve them. This orientation will make you responsive to their feedback; it will cause you to look at the service or products you offer from their point of view – not just because they are important contributors to your bottom line. When you take care of the customer and provide excellent products or services – the bottom line will take care of itself.

Being quality conscious

Similarly, paying attention to quality enhances the customer experience and creates repeat customers. If the value, customer orientation, is respected, then you would want your customers to have the best quality you can offer them. You would want them to feel good about the product or service every time they use it. You would want the product or service you are offering to maintain quality and last as long as possible. Being quality conscious doesn’t only apply to external customers; your team and employees are your customers as well. Creating a culture of high quality encourages people to raise their standards and performance.

Being positive

We are habitually prone to focus on the negative, on what is not working right, and criticize or offer suggestions for improvement. A change in this orientation is necessary. Instead of immediately focusing on the negative, try to discover the strengths and build on them. Being positive gives people the confidence and energy necessary to improve. Placing value on positive attitudes in your organization benefits everyone’s outlook. Studies show that people feel inspired and empowered when they are surrounded by positivity. Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build research demonstrates that as people experience more positive emotions, they become more resilient to stress and develop a broader perspective that allows them to see the big picture and identify solutions. This is all good news for leaders who want to see more creative solutions from their team!

Being respectful

Respect is a human right and everyone deserves to be respected. While we all agree with this value, many are unaware of what it really implies. When someone speaks and we interrupt, we are not showing respect. When someone speaks and we don’t listen, we are not showing respect. But what if we arrive late to a meeting? Is that not disrespectful to the others present? We would probably never show up late for a meeting with someone of a higher social status. The value of being respectful is often ignored because people are so preoccupied with their own agenda. Yet we long for creativity and innovation in our organizations! Innovative ideas come from people at any level of an organization who are not discouraged from expressing their views, and are treated with respect. A culture of respect enables people to contribute knowing that they would be heard, and to share their ideas without fear. Treating people right because they truly matter fosters a healthy and trusting organizational culture.

Being in a learning mode

With all of the technological and scientific advances in recent years, we have access to vast amount of information to feed our learning. We are reminded how important it is to be lifelong learners. But being in a learning mode is not just being up to date with technology and information. A learning mode is an attitude that enables you to learn from your experience. It is an attitude that avoids rigidity and insisting that it’s “my way or the highway”. It is an attitude that encourages improvements and innovations. When you are in a learning mode, you are showing your team that you are open to change, that you respect the opinions of others, and listen to learn. You never know where the next great idea will come from!

Values permeate organizational culture in many ways. Setting clear ones, and the right ones, will lead your team to success.

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In our consulting practice we have reviewed many mission, vision and value statements in organizations worldwide. Having these statements in place is good. But, unfortunately, many of them serve just as inserts in a brochure or a plaque on a wall or a page in company website. Often the statements do really nothing to drive behavior on a day- to- day basis.

There is, in fact, confusion concerning even the meaning of these words. A Mission is the organization’s reason for existence, its statement of purpose. The Vision should be a picture of success in the future, a goal toward which the organization is striving. Values constitute the organization’s belief system. And strategy is the approach to turning vision into reality.

Often mission statements are actually vision statements and communicate what the company wants to achieve within a timeframe. Or vision statements may actually be strategies stating how the organization wishes to pursue its business. These confusing terms need to be replaced with truly meaningful, clear and inspiring statements. A meaningful mission statement in a food company, for example, should not be making money and adding to the stockholder profits. This is neither meaningful nor inspiring for the employees. A more meaningful mission could be providing healthier food to benefit families.

Once a meaningful mission is decided upon, how best communicate it?

Make sure the mission statement is expressed in clear language, that it is understandable by everyone from the CEO down to the frontline collaborators. Test it with a focused group of your people from different levels of the organization and revise the statement until it clearly communicates the purpose of the organization in a language understandable by all.

Ask your direct reports to communicate this mission to their direct reports, and assure understanding by posing questions about the statement and facilitating conversations at their level. Then, ask them to ask their direct reports to do the same at the next level until the process is cascaded down to the front lines.

And when you manage your people by walking around and talking to them, or when you conduct meetings in person or virtually, be sure you frame your questions in such a way that the mission is at its center. This means that your conversations center on fulfilling the purpose of the organization instead of achieving a certain result. That doesn’t mean you ignore the results; it means you frame your comments such that the achievement of results is the consequence of fulfilling the mission.

Communicating a brief and concise statement that clearly expresses the mission of the organization is one of the key elements necessary for aligning your people. Of course, this alone will not establish nor sustain alignment. More is needed, but it is an excellent start.

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