This morning, Herman Gonzalez told me that he’s got a great idea for a book title. We brainstormed for 5-10 minutes and came up with the following tips.
Think of the three Vs: vision, values and vibes. Teams get into trouble because there is no mission. No mission = no vision. No mission and vision = no core values from which the team’s culture (vibes) can be built.
Think of the V formation: When the leader of the buffalos jumps, the rest follows. In contrast, a flock of geese save energy by flying in V formation. More importantly, they take turns leading.
As a manager, your job should not be to manage time but to invest time on your teams. Mentor them to shape the three Vs and transform them from a herd of buffalos into a flock of geese.
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I don’t agree on mission thing. I’ve yet to see a mission which would change anything in my work. When I was in charge of creating a mission we’ve just created it for a company website only (since everyone these days has one) and it wasn’t communicated internally in any way.
Actually it was an improvement from times where there was mission statement which was communicated but everyday work was completely disconnected from its content. At least people didn’t laugh at the mission statement since there was none.
For me company mission is almost always a bullshit. Team missions are usually the same. It because simple reason companies exist is to make money. And simple reasons people works is to earn money (yes, I oversimplify a bit). Unfortunately this makes poor mission statements. So all these elegiac statements are created which means basically nothing for junior developers or senior quality engineers or project managers out there.
I recall quality mission statement in my current company which in first version took more than A4 page and my head blew off after reading first couple of paragraphs. I proposed to cut everything except of “We build software we’d like to use” statement. It wasn’t accepted though so we ended up with something no one could repeat without checking in the intranet quality site.
Pawel, it is one thing to define a good mission, communicate it and live it daily, and totally different to simply come up with one for the sake of having one.
If you look at Disney’s mission, you’ll notice that it is fairly simple—to make people happy. Behind that simple statement, however, is for Disney to ensure that they differentiate and optimize their entertainment and information portfolios so that they can maximize shareholder value.
For Google, their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. So, their teams are marching toward that organizational mission statement in all of their projects be it web search, video search (YouTube), blogs (Blogger), pictures (Picasa) and so on. Some of these assets they build, some of them they buy. But, at the end of the day, they all channel their day-to-day effort towards one organizational mission statement.