PREPARE THE SOIL
Culture Touchstone Lab: Mission, Vision, Values, Action Portal
Three facilitated sessions to help you craft the statements that inspire.
Many leaders are frustrated to find that their team isn’t unified behind shared priorities.
Instead, people direct their efforts every-which-way with competing priorities.
If your Mission, Vision, Values, and Action Portal aren’t crystal clear and inspiring, then people will go in whatever direction seems easiest.
In many companies, these foundational touchstone tools are stale, or worse… Generic. They may almost read like, “We do good things for people.” Sure. We all want to do that. It’s just… What does it mean? Why here? Why us? And even, “Who cares?”
What percentage of your team can tell you – swiftly and without thinking – what your collective mission is? What’s the vision? What are the values that animate you as a company? Ask them…
If you find that in fact they can’t recall your mission, your vision, and your values, you may be tempted to blame your team.
It’s not on them… It’s time for an upgrade.
Are your company’s touchstone statements too vague to be compelling?
Are they too full of jargon to be inspiring, or too convoluted and long to remember?
We’ll help you answer the questions…
- Where are we now?
- Where are we going?
- How do we get there?
We’ll help you rediscover what’s essential so you magnetize talent and customers alike almost without trying.
Ready to make real change? Take Initiative Today
You Might Be Ready For Culture Navigation Package If…
When people don’t know or don’t care about where they’re going, they don’t care how they get there.
Do you find that people are punching the clock instead of working with determination and purpose? Do you have more turnover on your team than you’d like? Are there teams within your company who’d do anything for each other within their work-group, but who don’t extend that loyalty, compassion, and sense of shared purpose to people on other teams within your company?
There’s a lot of talk about how “entitled” Millennials are.
At The Yes Works, we don’t believe they’re any more entitled than any other generation. Rather, they’re focused on a life of purpose and impact. If you want to engage the growing power of Millennials in the workforce, it’s likely time to sharpen the great sword of purpose that your Mission, Vision, Values, and Action Portal can be.
Other reasons to consider engineering a Culture Touchstone Lab include:
- You’d like to see a common sense of direction among your team
- You need to attract and retain people with more power and ease
- There’s conflict in leadership and strategy meetings that has you asking, “How did we get here?”
- No one tells you about how inspired they are to come to work every day.
- You’ve got customer churn because your customers are price-shopping.
- Your marketing messages (and your marketing team) are confused and ineffective
- You sometimes feel as if you’ve forgotten why you began this work in the first place.
Results You Might See From This Program…
Humans are meaning-making machines. That’s how our brains are wired. We see loosely associated facts, and we tell stories to make connections – narratives to give them meaning and context.
If you don’t control the narrative, you don’t control the meaning, and you don’t control the direction of your company or the teams within it.
Once you’ve got a solid, specific, unique, and inspiring Navigational Compass, you’ll have your hands on the helm again.
This focussing light will shine a path for your team. People will band together, inspired, keyed-in, and unified like sports fans in and around an arena on game-day.
What’s it like in your city in a sports-bar on game-day? Everyone, from every walk-of-life, is maniacally focused on the same thing as everyone else… VICTORY. Differences, disagreements, and distractions melt into the background as everyone bends their energy, their efforts, and their intentions toward one common goal. Winning for the home-team.
And these sports-fans can’t even actually affect the outcome in any way – say what you will about Jack’s lucky drawers. They have no effect on the game-play at all, and yet they’re collectively, energetically, and consumingly focused on that shared goal.
Imagine if your team – if everyone in every seat in your company – brought that same fervor, intensity, focus, and determination to their work, to their relationships within your company, and to winning for your customers…
Imagine the possibilities.
Culture Touchstone Lab FAQ
Mission is a carefully considered, often nuanced reason for being: Whom do we serve, to solve what problem, and in what way?
Vision defines what we’re aiming for in the future we’re creating together.
And our values have influenced our mission and vision, and define the boundaries we won’t cross in our pursuit of those aims.
An Action Portal keeps you and your team oriented in the short term – in the moment – to make choices you can be proud of, even when they may not have been, in retrospect, “the best choices.”
At The Yes Works, our Action Portal is, “We want to make your work-life better.” So that’s what we aim to do in every interaction. Maybe we’ll make an impulse decision with a client that’s not a great business decision… It eats into our profit margins a bit too much, for example.
If it makes your work-life better, then it was a solid decision.
Disney wants its guests to have a magical vacation experience. So, they’ll make “errors” to that end.
What will you allow errors in service of?
If you’ve already got a Mission, Vision, and Values, then maybe you don’t need us for this, and we should focus instead on helping you with leadership development, with team building that lasts, and/or with developing a culture of innovation and problem solving.
And, if you and your team aren’t absolutely inspired and chomping at the bit to achieve your mission… If your vision isn’t painted in technicolor vibrancy that everyone can see clear as day in their mind’s-eye, and if your values don’t set your company apart from the pack of other companies in your industry, then…
It might be time for a refresh.
You don’t need this navigation package. Plenty of companies get by without one. Others keep going with an outdated set of navigational tools that collect dust on the proverbial shelf.
You don’t need this to get by. You’re getting by right now.
And… Getting by isn’t your dream. You didn’t grow up thinking, “I can’t wait to run a company that gets by.
You want a company that soars.
And for that, you need inspiration. And inspiration comes with purpose. And common purpose comes from common vision.
You need a Mission, Vision, and Values – a Navigational Package – to THRIVE!
We love you and believe you and your team deserve the best, most inspiring work-life possible wherever you are.
If you’re with us in the Puget Sound, great. We’re neighbors. We’ll come to your shop!
If you’re not in the Seattle/Tacoma area, that’s cool. We can absolutely do this with you and your team remotely. And we’ve been known to travel (some of our team in fact is in other parts of the country).
Even if you’re not our neighbor, we can come to you.
You’re the leader… When you read your Mission, Vision, and Values, does every piece of them make you want to cast aside whatever you’re doing and bend your mind, your muscle, and your will to accomplishing those goals?
Are you inspired and animated by them, and eager to serve your clients through them?
If not, this refresh is overdue.
Is each person on your team hungry to achieve these goals for the customer? Are they bringing up these focal-points in conversations about strategy and business direction? If you ask someone what the company is animated by, can they tell you what your Mission, VIsion, and Values are?
If not, this refresh is overdue.
There’s no should here. Maybe you should do this yourselves.
If you’ve got the skills and the clarity of thinking together that will allow you to distill complex thinking and seemingly conflicting opinions into a simple, specific, and compelling statement and get there together as a team, then more power to you.
That’s hard for any team to do. As the saying goes, “Even the sharpest knife can’t carve its own handle.”
And if you don’t have this package put together already, maybe that’s because you could use a little outside facilitation. You might be challenged by a little smoke in your eyes as a team with competing priorities. You might be a little too close.
We’ve all found value at times (sometimes a lot of the time) in a little outside perspective and reflection.
At The Yes Works, supporting you to create your rearticulated Mission, Vision, and Values, it’s not our job to tell you what they are or should be. It’s our job to hold up a clarifying mirror so you and your team can see yourselves and your ideals a little better.
Firstly, ain’t nothing wrong with a little feel-good. People who feel good work good. They support good. Team good.
So, perhaps they are a feel-good talisman.
And they’re a powerful business tool as well.
Your business plan and business strategy are a map to help you succeed as a company.
Even a map isn’t a whole lot of good if you don’t have a destination. You know what the landscape looks like from 10,000 feet. You just don’t know where you’re going.
Point to the mountain top. Draw an X on the map. Now your team is oriented to the future you’re trying to build. And most maps will show you a myriad of ways you can get there.
Traffic jam ahead? A bridge is out? No worries, I see another way we can get where we’re going.
Hey, we didn’t say it was time to change them. If you’ve read this far, maybe that’s because you’re doubting the power of the Mission, Vision, and Values you have in place now – however much you may like them.
It’s not just a matter of liking or not liking what you’ve got. It’s a question rather of being driven by them, unified by them, inspired and teamified by them.
If you like what you’ve got and it’s working for you, don’t change anything.
If you like what you’ve got, and it’s not working for you, then it’s time for a change.
When companies create messages that are boring, it’s usually one of three things.
Either it’s fear… People would rather fit in than stick out, or it’s compromise. When a group tries to create something great together, sometimes they end up with greatness by honing and developing one another’s ideas.
Sometimes you end up with tofu (sorry tofu). He wants 4. She wants 6. They settle on 5. The extremities that made choices interesting get sanded off. Nothing unique remains.
The third reason is low-hanging fruit. Some values are universal, and they aren’t the best candidates for your company’s core values.
Patrick Lencioni (famous business and leadership author of books including The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team) calls values like honesty, and win-win, “pay to play.” If you’re not operating with those values, you have no business being in business.
Lencioni – and we at The Yes Works – recommend a short list of core values that go beyond the minimum required values to operate ethically, and focus on those that make you, your company, your culture idiosyncratic… Unique.