Begin with the end
For a year before the strategic planning process started, Proctor asked her employees one big question: “How will we know if we achieve our mission?”
There were other questions, too, like, “What do you think St. Joseph is about?” and, “What should we strive to accomplish?” but this one laid the foundation for the direction of the company. The answers would define the mission in modern times.
“Sometimes, mission statements can seem fairly lofty and hard to translate,” Proctor says. “What we created was the way to say we’ll know that we’re achieving our mission when we can achieve these three mission outcomes.”
To make a mission statement new, ask your organization to explain what it would look like to achieve it.
“Leaders have to ask themselves, ‘What are the outcomes I’m trying to drive toward?’” Proctor says. “What usually happens is people develop strategy, but they don’t know the specific outcomes they want that strategy to deliver. You’ll write metrics for the strategy that measure how well you’re doing that strategy, but it doesn’t tell you if you’re getting any closer to what your mission statement is.
“My point was, we’ve got to start with the outcomes first. We need to say, ‘These are the outcomes we expect to achieve,’ and then, ‘What’s our strategy to achieve that?’”
The input she received wound up in front of about 100 leaders, including both systemwide and local hospital executives, physicians and members of the religious congregation. During a facilitated three-day retreat that included a couple 12-hour days, they worked to condense the spectrum of feedback into three snapshots of a fulfilled mission.
“We had them do visioning exercises such as, ‘What would The New York Times say 10 years from now about St. Joseph Health System?’” Proctor says. “Then we would digest that and say, ‘OK, well if they said these things about us, what was really important here was this, that we had accomplished these things, that we had improved the quality for patients, etc.’ So we just kept honing down through different exercises to get more and more focused.”
The CEO’s role in this is to listen — which may not be as simple as it sounds when you’re the funnel in a very iterative, involved process.
“One of my jobs in that retreat was to listen to everything and try and synthesize it,” Proctor says. “You listen to all of the input. And then toward the end, I took it and said, ‘OK, here’s what I’m hearing. I’m hearing these things are what’s really important to us.’ And then we debated.”
With the help of a facilitator from Boston-based Center for Applied Research, the retreat helped the St. Joseph team refine three conceptual mission outcomes: That every encounter would be sacred, that patients would receive perfect care, and that St. Joseph communities would be the healthiest in the country.
