Charging Directly Toward The Mission

Before closing the loop with one final thing I’ll challenge you to consider from the mission statement we’ve been looking at, “Delivering customer satisfaction with empowered employees using continuous improvement to get it right the first time, every time,” I want to stress one last time that I’m not suggesting this this particular statement is good or bad. I am, however, challenging you to consider how it relates to the mission statement in your organization, the one you need your team to rally around, and whether or not it provides the kind of clarity they can buy into. If you’re good there, the elephant left in the room is the manner in which you exemplify the behaviors you hope to see throughout your team. And we’ll look at that a bit more over the next few days as we sift through something I read on our flight to Tampa…

A few posts back, I mentioned that I believed the ideas of continuous improvement and right the first time, every time were contradictory. I standby that statement! One of the most liberating things I’ve ever heard John Maxwell say is that “you’re never good the first time.” For me, that was permission to not be quite as eloquent as John is today (after teaching and training for over 50 years) with any given training session I deliver. While I don’t interpret that as a license to shirk the responsibility of preparation or to slop through the delivery, it does give me some peace to know that I’m better today than I was 10 years ago and that I’ll be better 5 years from now than I am today - provided I remain willing to do the necessary work.

With that in mind, I completely understand the importance of delivering a product or service to our customers and clients that’s absolutely right the first time, every time. Missing the mark on that is a quick way to increase the sales of our competitors! But if we want a culture where our team members are truly empowered to focus on continuous improvement, we also need to be very intentional about building in a tolerance for mistakes; healthy mistakes within our processes that can be evaluated in order to stimulate the improvement we’re really after!

If we’re not extremely clear about where and when mistakes should be allowed, and even expected, holding that standard of being right the first time, every time may result in preventing anyone from attempting something new in order to improve. And while we certainly need to have safeguards in place to make sure any errors stay in-house, emphasizing the importance of being willing to fail so that we can succeed at a higher level can be what keeps us from staying trapped in the way we’ve always done it…

Each of the four catchphrases listed in that statement are extremely relevant, especially for that specific organization’s industry, but building an explicit understanding of how each applies to every individual involved is critical! Whether it’s a formal statement we frame and share throughout the entire company, or just the unique purpose we hold in front of a portion of our team, we need to be sure that it’s clear and concise, it speaks to the outcomes we’re hoping to achieve internally as well as what we want to deliver externally, and each team member involved has complete clarity about the role they play.

When we have this in place, we can stand back and be proud of what we’ve done! But only for a few minutes because this is where the real work begins! We’ll dig into what that work looks like over the next few posts with some help from The Law of the Picture…