Work together
It would be wonderful if you could quickly create a message that everyone loves all by yourself, but that’s not usually possible.
“The one thing you have to do is involve a fair number of people in the organization so you can get feedback from everyone, because the mission statement is not the statement of the CEO or the executive team,” he says. “It’s really more of a statement of the organization. It’s good to include different people within the organization to get their feelings on it.”
He started with some small focus groups with front-line employees and lower-level managers. They were given the current mission and value statement and were asked what they knew about it, what they would suggest to change it and what about it was important.
That information was brought by a consultant to a one-day off-site retreat where the executive team and the managers would use it to help shape the new mission and values.
The participants were asked to select words that they felt should be the focus of the message.
“Try to just pick off keywords,” he says. “What is it that we think our organization is doing or should be doing in the future that would suggest that we either develop or change our mission statement?
“The mission statement should be a purpose statement. Why do we exist? Why are we here? What are we trying to accomplish? It’s not a slogan. There are slogans in organizations, too, but this is more a statement of purpose. What do we expect to accomplish on a daily basis in our organization?”
When the group gathered at the retreat, three ideas were prominent with everyone. Each person wanted the statement to revolve around leadership, community and improved health.
“We had a pretty good idea of where we were going, but it takes awhile to get there because when you get 15 or 20 people around a table, everybody has an opinion and you want to hear their opinions and understand,” he says.
The consultant would break the teams into small groups and would ask them what words they wanted to be in the statement.
“That way everybody is getting input and you’re getting to see different ideas,” he says. “Because if you try to get ideas from 20 or 30 people, you’re not going to have that many people talk, first of all. You can go in a variety of different directions, where as if you have a small group, I think we had five or six around each table, then everyone has the opportunity to give input.
“It was kind of a quick turnaround. You had to do it within 10 minutes and then (the consultant) would come by and pull off the keywords, and we’d end up with about probably 15 keywords on the screen by the time we went through it a few times.”
The small groups would reconvene and would have to rank those words and put them in a couple of sentences, which would then be discussed by the group as a whole.
After going through that process a few times, they were able to trim the words down into a succinct mission statement: The mission of Aultman Health Foundation is to lead our community to improved health.
For the values, they ended up with a statement that centered around using the word “respect” as an acronym.
“It’s easy to remember,” he says. “Respect: You may not remember all seven points, but it’s easy to remember the word ‘respect,’ and it’s a very powerful word.”
Overall, the lesson with creating a message with a group is forming an environment where people will feel free to share their opinions without being judged.
“The most important thing you have to do is listen,” he says. “A lot of times, we want to react to things and have the answer or disagree. The best thing to do is to sit back and be calm and listen, and sometimes you are going to hear things that you don’t like to hear. But those are opportunities to improve your engagement, opportunities to improve your service, to improve outcomes. There are opportunities for improvement that you have to be willing to listen to what an employee is saying about the current situation if you want to make the future situation better.”
