4 keys to developing your mission or values openly

Picture this: You’re sitting in Yet Another Quarterly Global Company Meeting, listening to the executive team prattle on about its most recent Important Global Initiatives. Next topic on the agenda, says the CEO, is our new company mission.

“The executive team got together at the recent board retreat, and after a long discussion, we’ve finalized a new company mission,” he says. A slide pops up on the screen behind him, and the new mission appears in a bold and important-looking typeface.

As he begins his explanation, at this point you will likely have one of the following reactions:

1. Wow, these executives are geniuses! What an inspiring statement. I’m so lucky to have an opportunity to work at a company with such bold leadership vision.
2. Hmm...Sounds OK, and I’m sure it is meaningful to the executives. Do I have to memorize this?
3. What a bunch of crap.
4. What time does this meeting end? Where should we go to lunch today?

In your organization how would most people react? If you believe most people would react with 2, 3, or 4, your organization is a great candidate to run a mission or values-development project openly.

Let’s face it. Developing an organizational mission or set of values that are truly inspirational and unique is a tough challenge. Mission statements have a bit of a bad rap out there in the world. Many people view them skeptically, often with good reason. There are a lot of mission statements that aren’t inspiring, aren’t differentiated, or have no basis in organizational reality. They are many sets of corporate values drawn up from a list of usual suspects (innovation, service excellence, integrity, teamwork, blah, blah, blah) that inspire no one.

I was once a skeptic as well. Almost 15 years ago, someone at Red Hat asked me to be part of a team tasked with figuring out the company values. When I first heard about the project, my view of corporate values was that they were glorified Successories posters that you’d put on the walls outside the bathrooms to be ignored by everyone.

But after reading the book Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, I came away inspired that when done right, mission and values creation projects could be really meaningful and impactful. Our team went on to develop a set of four company values that are still closely held within Red Hat today.

Red Hat has continued to hone its inclusive approach to internal strategic projects like these over the years. Another notable project was the effort to articulate the Red Hat mission with the help of the Red Hat employee community. CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote about this process in his book The Open Organization and also online for both the Harvard Business Journal and Management Innovation eXchange.

And at New Kind, we’ve continued to help organizations inside and outside the technology industry use an open process on strategic projects like developing company mission and values. We believe that when you bring people into the process, authentically soliciting their ideas, they are much more likely to embrace the final result. By taking strategic projects like these out of the executive retreat and into the employee community, you can empower people, build relationships, and achieve a better final product—all at the same time.

So how could you open up the process of defining or redefining the mission or values for your organization? Here are a few lessons we’ve learned:

Read the rest of this post on opensource.com.