424: Leaders Having Visions Were Disparaged

THE Leadership Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

I remember the mockery, the cynical sneering, the derision about leaders having “visions”. The implication was they had lost the plot and were lurching into psychobabble. Being a cynical Aussie, I was probably one of the smarty pants commentariat pronouncing the whole thing a ragged jest. Why was that? I wish I had taken notes, but my memory tells me the content of those early leader vision efforts were trite, humdrum platitudes and so easily able to double hat as viable cures for insomnia. So much has changed and the vision, mission and values of the organisation have become staples of leadership culture building focus. A lot of the results of these efforts are still dubious though and It would be a good thing if your staff knew what the vision, mission and values actually were. Objectively, if you can’t recall them, then it is impossible to own them or live them.

Unfortunately, staff don’t know them in many cases. How do I know this? One of the party tricks for trainers going into corporate environments, is to swiftly unhook the beautifully framed vision, mission and value statements from the wall, rotate them 180 degrees such that the content can’t be seen. Those assembled for the training are then asked to tell us the content. In my experience, no one ever gets the vision or mission at all. Collectively a training class of thirty employees may get two or three of the values right. Why is that?

Sitting thirty floors above the daily melee, the big bosses in their quiet, comfortable corner offices, imagine that they are leadership legends and have effectively united the entire organisation around a common direction, through this holy trinity of the vision, mission and values. Deluded would be a kind description.

Usually, the vision and value statements are too long, so no one can remember them. This is apart from the fact that the President wrote it, sadly without the benefit of any copyrighting skills or faint familiarity with wordsmithing. The senior executive addiction for adding things to the content, has the direct negative effect of diluting the key message. The opposite problem can be reducing the content down to a few words, which invariably churns up platitudinous, vapid cliches. It is difficult to get excited about the banal.

We are a small company, so many years ago, we were able to get the whole team working on developing the content with my primary purpose being to foster ownership of the result. That only works though if the poets, balladeers and lyricists stay with the company and no new people join. Obviously that never happens and so now we have people who had no part in the original composition project. If we were a major employer with battalions of people, it would be impossible to generate any sense of ownership through everyone’s contribution of words and ideas. What needs to be done to bring these aspirational framed words to life?

This is what we do. Every morning at 9.00am we hold the Daily Dale. This is a play on words given the founder of our firm was the famous Dale Carnegie. The first order of business is we take turns to go through the Vision, Mission, and Values. I stole this idea from the Ritz Carlton Hotel Group. They have their same set pieces for every shift, in every location, world wide. At the Ritz, the staff take turns leading the daily gathering, so it is not dominated by “very important” executives. This egalitarian touch works because now the ownership is driven down the ranks. I attended a week of training with them in Washington and sure enough, when we attended the executive team daily gathering, one of the secretaries led the proceedings, rather than the President.

So in our case, even if someone joined last week, they go through this pseudo inculcation exercise of reprising the vision, mission and values every morning. We also feature one of the 60 Dale Carnegie Human Relations and Stress Management Principles for that day and the person leading the meeting talks about what that particular principle means for them. Again, this is an effort to foster ownership of the principles. They are the core of our training philosophy.

Recently by executive fiat, I added a Strategic Vision. I am a bit of a slow learner, but I realised that our current vision, penned by the team, talks about who we are and what we do for the changing the world and not so much about where we are going. With Covid ravaging people’s health, the economy and in particular our training business, I saw that we needed to regroup for the post pandemic world, hopefully about to emerge over the next six months. I hope I haven’t jinxed it by saying that!

So here are some reflective musings for you. Can your team pass the test of recalling the Vision, Mission and Values, if we turn up on your doorstep, to run some training sessions? Are you an honorary Aussie cynic about all of this vision business and not a convert as yet? Do you have a positive inculcation mechanism to instill these ideas and build a distinctive company culture, where these concepts are carefully arranged at the centre? Do you need to recalculate the culture you want to create post-pandemic?

Hopefully we are approaching a brave new post pandemic world. Are you preparing for it now or are you still locked in the death roll with the virus? Now might be the time to look up from the affray and look toward the future.