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Strategic Planning Best Practice 2 – Prioritize the Mission
Ideally, an organization’s mission statement would convey a singular purpose. However, mission statements often enumerated several purposes, such as creating shareholder value, contributing to the community, and offering workforce prosperity. When this occurs, organizations struggle to serve multiple masters.
Prioritizing the mission establishes the relative importance of an organization’s multiple purposes; focusing decisions and driving actions toward achievement of the organization’s primary purpose while allowing progress to be made on objectives of lesser importance. The amount of emphasis given to each purpose should make their relative importance obvious to all members of the organization. Additionally, decision-making should demonstratively reflect and reinforce the mission priorities such that a proportionate amount of managerial attention and organizational resources are applied to the achievement of each purpose.
About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
An organization’s mission statement defines its purpose, its reason for being. These statements, however, tend to be broad and somewhat vague; making it difficult to identify the specific products, services, initiatives, and people that will most directly enable the organization to achieve its purpose.
Well-constructed performance measurement systems provide a means of comparison between various products, services, and business units by ensuring relevant measures are horizontally shared across the organization.
Performance measurement systems should be anchored on the single measure of organizational success (defined by the organization's mission) and vertically cascaded down through the organization Each successive measurement tier becomes more specific than its predecessor with the lowest tier describing individual contributor behaviors and resulting outcomes.
Performance measures serve to align an organization’s efforts to the achievement of its mission. As part of a company’s evaluation and control program, they quantifiably monitor important characteristics of the company’s products and services and the performance of the individuals and processes creating them. Performance measures support managerial decision-making by providing useful information regarding:
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