Vision, Values, and Organizational Excellence

Do you find yourself in a leadership role or position? Here are some classic ideas on vision, values, and organizational excellence from renowned business consultant and author Jim Collins:

Executives spend too much time drafting, wordsmithing, and redrafting vision statements, mission statements, values statements, purpose statements, aspiration statements, and so on. They spend nowhere near enough time trying to align their organizations with the values and visions already in place.

…[T]here is a big difference between being an organization with a vision statement and becoming a truly visionary organization. The difference lies in creating alignment-alignment to preserve an organization’s core values, to reinforce its purpose, and to stimulate continued progress towards its aspirations. When you have superb alignment, a visitor could drop into your organization from another planet and infer the vision without having to read it on paper.

…you cannot “set” organizational values, you can only discover them. Nor can you “install” new core values into people. Core values are not something people “buy in” to. People must be predisposed to holding them. Executives often ask me, “How do we get people to share our core values?” You don’t. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren’t predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere.

Your core values and purpose, if properly conceived, remain fixed. Everything else—your practices, strategies, structures, systems, policies, and procedures—should be open for change.

Read Jim Collins’ full article here, and learn more about Christian Union’s commitment to organizational excellence.