{"id":80,"date":"2008-11-01T12:39:41","date_gmt":"2008-11-01T17:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/?p=80"},"modified":"2014-12-22T20:14:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T01:14:52","slug":"planting-and-excellencetree-a-critical-step-in-living-a-mission-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/80\/planting-and-excellencetree-a-critical-step-in-living-a-mission-statement","title":{"rendered":"“Planting” an Excellence Tree: A Critical Step in Living a Mission Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"

To return to descriptions of all 6 steps toward Mission Activation, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Living a mission statement requires an Activated Mission.\u00a0 The metaphor of an “Excellence Tree” was designed to help promote Mission Activation.\u00a0 Here are the four phases of “Mission Activation Step 2: “Planting an Excellence Tree” <\/strong>the second step to consider when attempting to actually live a mission statement:<\/p>\n

A) Identification of “mission-aligned” primary objectives<\/em><\/strong> is the first phase of Planting the Tree.\u00a0 In order to see more Mission Activation, everyone needs to know\u00a0(and agree, at least to a certain extent) that objectives such as \u201cIncrease\u00a0financial profits by 10% this quarter\u201d or \u201cPromote a culture of excellence and satisfaction throughout the team,\u201d or \u201cRecruit and train the best people,\u201d\u00a0etc.\u00a0are the most important ways in which to spend time, money, and energy.\u00a0 Primary objective clarification often plays a key role in helping teams stay motivated to live their mission on a daily basis.\u00a0 If people know why they are being asked to do something (e.g., “because it helps us accomplish Primary Objective #1 – and because Primary Objective #1 helps fulfill mission in this way . . ., “), they tend to have a stronger commitment to doing what they are asked to do at a high level of quality.\u00a0 At our firm we call this process “Mission Connection;” getting ourselves and others strongly connected with our Mission by being able to answer all “why should I do this?” questions with “because it helps our mission stay activated — and here’s how. . . ”<\/p>\n

B) Prioritization of primary objectives<\/em><\/strong> is another critical phase in the planting of an Excellence Tree.\u00a0 After identifying primary objectives, the following questions often need to be answered: “Which is the most important objective?” and\u00a0 “Which is the least important one — the objective that we can expect to focus on less when time, energy, and\/or revenue is short?”\u00a0 These are tough questions to answer; I know from experience how easy it can be to say, “ALL of them are equally important — let’s focus on all of them equally!”\u00a0 However, I’ve learned (the hard way) that failing to prioritize communicates to everyone that nothing is a priority -0 and this is a great way to\u00a0“drown the tree” in a tide of frenzied activity,\u00a0quickly killing Mission Activation.\u00a0 If no one is very clear about what\u00a0is most important, people are forced\u00a0to simply guess what to do now and what to place on the back-burner when time or energy is short — or, even worse, burn themselves out pursuing goals that are not as important as other, more strongly mission-aligned goals.\u00a0 This guesswork can lead to teams spending time and energy in places that are not as critical to the team’s mission; clearly prioritized primary objectives can help teams to avoid this tremendously harmful guessing game.<\/p>\n

C) Creation and prioritization of <\/em><\/strong>“objective-aligned” SMART Goals<\/em><\/strong>, the next phase in the Excellence Tree planting process, helps teams to track primary objective-related progress in clear, measurable, consistent ways.\u00a0 To avoid frenzied mindsets<\/a> (and the often huge amounts of wasted time, energy, and money that are associated with them), we have found that it is critical to create and prioritize SMART Goals — Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-bound goals that clarify the path toward achieving primary objectives.\u00a0 We have found three important things related to this phase of planting an Excellence Tree:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. that addressing this phase in a quality way is an extremely powerful mechanism of clarifying the path toward\u00a0Mission Activation<\/li>\n
  2. that many people “know” about the power of SMART Goals, but rarely “do” SMART Goal development (click here for\u00a0research on why we often don’t do what we know<\/a>)<\/li>\n
  3. that many skip doing this because they are not fully aware of the truly devastating impact of failing to address this critical aspect of Mission Activation.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Our team has found that failure to address this phase in a quality way is the number 1 reason why missions are so often left unactivated.\u00a0 If your mission seems as though it is not activated, odds are that a major part of the problem lies within this phase.\u00a0 Click here for more on how to develop truly SMART Goals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    D) Distribution of these SMART Goals to the \u201cright people\u201d<\/em><\/strong> is the last phase involved in the planting of an Excellence Tree.\u00a0 Who are the right people to give SMART Goals to?\u00a0\u00a0Is it best to give them to the smartest people, the people with the most seniority, the people with the most impressive titles?\u00a0 Our answer is simple, but powerful: give SMART Goals to team members who are most likely to achieve these goals in quality ways on (or before) deadline.\u00a0 This probably sounds like common sense to most, but this is not common practice, in our experience!<\/p>\n

    The high performance teams that we have encountered know the value of giving specific SMART Goals to the right people as often as possible (regardless of titles, degrees,seniority, etc.); people who are truly able to achieve their goals at a high level of quality on a regular basis on (or before) deadline.\u00a0 Jim Collins, in his classic book Good to Great<\/em><\/strong>, identifies “3 Circles” of greatness: passion, excellence, and need.\u00a0 I often talk about distributing SMART Goals in a “3 Circle Way” — goal distribution that is based on how passionate someone is about achieving the goal, how much excellence (training and aptitude) a person has to achieve it, and how well aligned the goal is with the mission (or the “need” for the goal in relation to the mission).\u00a0 We have found that teams that do not pay enough attention to distributing their goals in ways that keep people within their 3 Circles as much as possible —\u00a0 including tracking how well these goals are achieved to validate the 3 Circle nature of each goal — tend to struggle with Mission Activation.<\/p>\n

    To return to descriptions of all 6 steps toward Mission Activation, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    To return to descriptions of all 6 steps toward Mission Activation, click here. Living a mission statement requires an Activated Mission.\u00a0 The metaphor of an “Excellence Tree” was designed to help promote Mission Activation.\u00a0 Here are the four phases of “Mission Activation Step 2: “Planting an Excellence Tree” the second step to consider when attempting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teamgroup-excellence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.excellenceuniversity.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}