When Paul Johnson took the reins of Kelley Blue Book Co. Inc. as president and CEO in 2000, he was the company’s first leader from outside the Kelley family.
But despite his outsider status, he faced the task of refocusing the 500-employee automotive valuation company on the meaning of the Kelley name. That required sharpening the long-term vision and mission statement of the company through communication with employees at all levels.
A company won’t be able to adequately carry out its mission or achieve its goals without a work force that is focused on those goals.
Smart Business spoke with Johnson about how to get your employees focused on your company’s mission and goals.
Q. How do you get employees to embrace a mission statement?
How you get people a part of the vision and mission is to establish a clear vision and a clear mission statement that people remember but that are also powerful enough to guide actions.
The core values and the leadership principles, you know they’re taking root and being embraced when you hear them being quoted in meetings and they become part of the fabric of what the company is and part of the nomenclature as you’re working through difficult decisions and strategic alternatives.
What I’ve done is build on a core of six values and how they translate into how we operate on a daily basis. So the next step in the core values is we created a set of fairly granular leadership principles that really focus around three things. Those are developing people, execution and performance, and achieving results.
I put those in place as I was building the leadership team here to really establish my expectations of what the company’s leaders were, but maybe even more importantly, to establish what employees should be expecting from their leaders. These are working documents and things for which I hold my leadership accountable.
