Performance is definitely the direction we all want to take with our teams, right? We want our teams to perform at the highest level. But in order to get there, we will have to have some oversight. (I didn’t want to say “management.”)
Our leadership team here in Canada just had a leadership meeting. 3 days off-site for some intensive time to recalibrate and refocus on our key tasks. The theme of our time together was “Healthy Oversight.” Oversight is critical to any team’s ability to perform effectively. One of the main functions of oversight is to guarantee that the team stays focused on its own core vision. We were very encouraged by Murray Taylor’s message about staying true to our core purpose.
Southwest Airlines’ purpose (from their website) is to: “Connect People to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.” It’s easy to imagine how Southwest could drift from “friendly,” or from “reliable,” or from “low-cost.” On the other hand, “The Salvation Army exists to share the love of Jesus Christ, meet human needs and be a transforming influence in the communities of our world.” Maybe you thought that the Salvation Army existed to recycle used clothes and furniture. You could be forgiven for thinking that.
It’s called Mission Drift, and Murray recommended we read Peter Greer’s book of the same name. Our job is to stay laser-focused on the purpose of our team or organization. Our job as leaders is to keep our teammates focused on the team’s core purpose. Look above at Southwest’s purpose statement. One sentence, one line. One of your first jobs as a team must be to hone your common vision into a form that is brief and clear, so that each team member can remember and return to it.
I recall a time years ago when one national office of a multinational charity began to drift. The country director wrote to me and asked if I thought there was adequate accountability across the membership. I went back to the emails of numerous members who had disagreed with the direction change the country director was proposing. Almost 100% of those emails referenced the core values of the organization which had been formalized at its inception. I replied to the national director that while he was citing nonprofit law in his country, his membership was more focused on the core purpose of the company. They were holding the director accountable to the nonprofit’s policies and principles. The national director had allowed himself to drift from the core direction of his international organization.
I guess the moral is, “Remember what you’re about, and keep reminding your team what they are all about.”