As I consider the efforts of successful and unsuccessful organizations, I am thinking about the vision and mission these organizations promote?
When you consider the organizations you belong to, what are the missions of those organizations and how are those missions maintained and updated as needed?
What efforts and goals do members of the organization share?
When you think about the organizations you belong to, what are the efforts and goals that members share? What is it that they are all committed to in their own lives and work and in the life and work of the organization? As I thought about that today some mainstays in the organizations I belong to include a commitment to health, happiness, support for one another, and good living. In the days ahead, I want to listen more carefully to how individuals aim to maintain and gain those attributes in their own lives. I want to understand what they need and how I might be able to help. I also want to think about this with regard to my own life.
What is getting in the way of the organizations collective action to work towards vision and mission?
The only way to understand what's getting in the way is to know the members of your organization well. To simply project what the problems are without consulting with organizational members mostly leads to misdirection and failure. That personal knowledge and those personal relationships are critical to meeting vision and mission in any organization.
Update vision and mission regularly
As life and the world around it changes, so does the vision and mission of organizations. We have to be aware of those changes, and change vision and mission accordingly. Making time to listen, observe, research, and find out about the changes creates the opportunity to update vision and mission in ways that lead to betterment. Updating vision and mission needs to be an inclusive process not an exclusive process. Once I watched an organization update their goals based on information from a few, privileged members of the organization rather than a fuller, more inclusive process. That resulted in a weak vision and mission. Inclusive, efficient processes provide a better path to updating vision and mission.
Time matters
Letting too much time get in the way of good efforts creates problems in any group or organization. Efficient, inclusive, timely systems of review, analysis, updating, and communication helps to keep groups and organizations timely. Time sucks such as focusing on issues that don't matter much, exclusive processes, ambition-driven efforts, and propaganda can truly slow down or obstruct the good work possible.
Collaboration is best
When individuals try to update organizations on their own, they rarely succeed. Positive updating processes depend on positive collaboration of all stakeholders. If you're on your own, you may want to start by forming better alliances with the people you work with, and with those alliances targeting common goals and positive potential.
Organizations depend on inclusive, positive vision and mission that all involved can get behind and support. Without that, organizations flail and fail. How will you work with others in your organization to update vision and mission as a valuable way to update and improve your organization?