When Did You Say That?

By

Robert A. Simpkins

Global Crosswinds, LLC

I’ve been doing strategic planning, in one form or another, for a long time.  There’s a downside and an upside to that lengthy experience.  The downside, causing endless frustration, is that I see that same mistakes repeated over and over again by the same organizations and the same leaders.  They just don’t seem to learn from their mistakes or completely understand the root causes of their success.  The upside side is that I’m able to track and log information about the undermining behaviors that tend to cause strategic plans to fall short of expectations or fail completely.

With all that experience, what do you think is the number one problem with most strategic statements – language!  Heaven help those who try to understand what the stated vision, mission and purpose of the organization, and how it relates to their daily job function.  I’ll try to protect the innocent by not naming specific organizations, but let me give you some examples:

•   A very large private enterprise states that their goal is to enrich the lives of their employees (What does enrich mean?)

•  Another private enterprise states that, in its support of the Federal government, they bring a strategic systems perspective to their customers.  (What is a strategic systems perspective?)

•  Another agency says they are Mission Oriented (Does that mean they orient all their activities to their Mission Statement?)

•   Still another says their goal is to Energize People (They’re never going to energize them with statements like that)

• Another states that their objective is to embrace innovation (What does embrace mean, and for that matter, how do they define innovation?  Are employees supposed to huge a robot?)

In most situations, senior leaders have a vague sense of what statements like these mean, but they leave it to the lower and non-management to figure it out for themselves.  Unfortunately, this is a critical chasm rarely bridged.What what’s the result of expressions of vague and poorly defined words?  Senior leadership repeatedly experiences disappointment and frustration.  A friend of mine, Dr. Neil Stroul, expressed it very well when he said “Resentment is when you fail to honor a request I never made.”  In other words, the leadership believe, and function, under the misguided belief that they have expressed their desires well and are requesting that everyone function in that manner.  Unfortunately, the operational personnel can’t define the intent and are not sure how to behave.

Tags: Communications, planning, strategic plans, strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 7:12 am and is filed under AIG, Barack Obama, Communications, Congress, Strategic Plan, Strategic Planning, leadership skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.