“Leadership is creating a future for your organization.”
– Gordon Sullivan

One of the most common problems I see among closely held businesses (actually most businesses) is a lack of clarity: By clarity, I mean the following:

1. Vision: Vision defines what your organization will look like and be doing in three years or so. You don’t have get fancy here, simply describe what you are building, what your revenues will be and what kind of customers you will be serving. Without a clear vision that everyone understands and shares, the organization’s work will be sloppy and disorganized.

2. Mission: Your Mission conveys why your company exists (and simply being profitable is not a vision). Mission is all about the promise you make to customers and the rallying cry for your engaged workforce. I know that many readers will read this with cynicism, but this is the goal of high performing organizations. Without a clear purpose, cynicism runs rampant and people are not working for a cause, which weakens employee engagement.

3. Goals: Goals define the key metrics and accomplishments for which you are aiming. Goals must have a time frame, be measureable and be balanced, i.e. the top line and bottom line are important but inadequate measures of an organization’s performance.

4. Roles: Most organizations have very weak role clarity. It is usually not clear for whom employees are really working and what their job duties and accountabilities really are. Without clarity of roles, people’s thinking, actions and accountabilities are muddled.

5. Action Plans: Action plans are the big projects that managers and executives should work on to grow and strengthen the business. These action plans should be clear and short, be attached to due dates and have a primary person responsible for completing them.

6. Accountability: Without a system and accountability, actions become sloppy and unfocused. We recommend weekly and monthly tracking of the goals and action plans.

To understand why business clarity is essential, think about your favorite sports team for a moment. Each team member has a specific role to play (although role agility and cross training are important for most sports). If the team members go into the game with different goals in mind, they won’t succeed. They’ll do a lot of running around and perhaps expend a lot of energy. However, if they’re going in opposite directions, they’ll never score. The only way they can win the game is to work together toward a common purpose.

Businesses are a lot like sports teams. Unless everyone in the organization is focused on the same goal, they’ll never achieve it. The employees may put in long hours and constantly be busy, but the company will not grow and thrive unless they’re working together toward a clear and common purpose. In other words, without clarity in the above areas, the likelihood is that even key employees are busy on the wrong things!

Harnessing effort into productivity

Business clarity starts at the top. Business leaders have a fundamental responsibility to create clarity and cascade it throughout the company in simple, easy-to-understand terms:
1. What are we building (Vision)?
2. Why are we building it (Mission)?
3. What specific and measureable goals are we trying to accomplish (Objectives)?
4. Who is responsible for what and to whom (roles)?
5. What are the big projects we are working on and when are they due and who is the owner (Action Plans)?
6. Who is accountable for doing what and when? Do we have a culture of performance and accountability (Accountability)?

Management must think through these critical areas, write them down and continuously communicate them to all employees. Simply posting a vision and mission statement is woefully inadequate if the goal is to create a high performing organization where employees are highly engaged.

Case Study

One of our clients had a twenty year history of success. Its customers were satisfied, the employee base was stable but the owner in many ways was a one man band. He worked 6 ½ days a week, at least ten hours a day and had virtually no management structure below him, leaving him making almost all decisions. He had not developed other thinkers and deciders. Realizing that his business model was burning him out and was not sustainable, he entered into a planning process with us to clarify the above six points and gathered the people in the company he thought (and we verified) had the capability to think and act like managers. With a fledgling “team at the top” he continued to clarify the vision, mission, objectives action plans and roles and engaged his team in the process of clarifying throughout the company and increasing accountability.

A few people gradually left, poor morale began to be replaced by a sense of pride in the employees work and in the company. Productivity increased quite dramatically and with it profitability. Is your organization creating and communicating clarity? Are your employees striving together toward common goals and a shared vision, or are they toiling away at cross purposes? Whose job is it in your organization to create and drive clarity? How are they doing?