What’s your mission? What’s your vision? In recent years, business owners and managers across the spectrum of the construction industry have spent untold hours developing mission and vision statements for their companies.
The goal is to put into succinct words an understanding of the role of your business in a wider community. Typically, the statements go beyond the simple act of delivering a product or service to include a manner of doing business that encompasses respect and value for partners.
Mission and vision statements can be powerful. They can define the culture of your company. They let customers and vendors understand your manner of doing business. They can unite employees behind a common objective.
Too often, though, I see a couple of major failings in companies that have gone through this exercise. After spending all the time and effort of creating mission and vision statements, owners often skip a crucial step. They forget (or fail) to communicate those ideas throughout the organization. Instead of becoming powerful tools that define a company culture, the statements become vestigial tails that are actually a hindrance to the course of doing work.
The lesson employees learn from seeing a failed attempt to establish a company mission or vision is that the company is defined by other voices. Often it’s the voice of the gossip or disgruntled that prevails. The company culture becomes negative, and while the owner or manager is the titular head, the company is no longer under his or her control.
The second failure I often see is when the company does communicate the mission or vision throughout the organization, but the employees don’t buy into the idea or face stronger forces that contradict the mission.
Consider this example. As part of its mission, a contractor extols the virtue of building long-term relationships and value with its customers and vendors. But a manager who needs to make a buying decision may be motivated to work with a specific vendor, such as a trade contractor, solely on the basis of price. He pushes hard to get a better price out of the vendor, ramming him down harder and harder, and placing him in competition with lower quality vendors. The manager’s compensation package may include incentives to improve profit margins, and the simplest way to accomplish that is to reduce costs.
Among subcontractors in the construction industry, this price pressure is a standard practice. It stands in direct opposition to the very mission and values often espoused by the companies with which they work.
What’s the takeaway from this? Mission and vision statements can be very powerful tools, but a failure to completely follow through on them can have significantly adverse effects on both employees and vendors.
I liken companies that fall into those traps to those that engage in greenwashing, the strategy of marketing green benefits but not actually delivering sustainability. Your mission and vision statements have to be authentic representations of the culture of your company. “Fake it till you make it” is not a viable mission statement.
