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Mission Statements - The Disconnect between Desire and Reality

Over the past few years, most organisations have gone down the road of developing mission statements, vision statements and statements of core values.

Articulating a direction and desired behaviours/values sets up a sense of the ideal culture the organisation strives to achieve. It defines what the organisation should look like. It establishes the agenda for how the organisation should function.

Sounds fine - but research indicates that things often don't work out that way.

By Mike Gourley, Director, Human Synergistics

The expectation behind such strategies is that they will shape the culture - "how things get done around here" - but evidence suggests that this is not the case.

Our data in New Zealand and Australia, collected from over 900 organisations, shows a serious disconnect between preferred (desired) cultures and actual operating cultures within the organisations surveyed.

While senior managers want cultures that encourage initiative, co-operation, teamwork, goal setting, creativity and commitment, most instead unwittingly develop cultures that encourage politics, internal competition, individualism, avoidance of blame and an unwillingness to commit.

This gap between senior management's preferred (desired) culture and the actual operating culture experienced by employees is what Human Synergistics calls the culture disconnect.

Although senior management strives to guide behaviour through statements of desired values, the reality is that most organisational members look to actions, not words, to figure out what is expected of them through the forces they face on a day-to-day basis.

In this way, the culture in any organisation is the outcome of the members' collective learning regarding what it takes to "fit in" and get things done and succeed - or even to just stay out of trouble and survive! - in that organisation's environment.

The Disconnect between Preferred and Actual cultures.
Part of the Organisational Development Model.

People within an organisation infer what is expected of them through the daily forces of structures, systems, technologies and skills/qualities. Often these forces are at odds with management's espoused values and this explains why, in many organisations, such core values are viewed with scepticism or even outright disdain!

On the other hand, if these structures, systems, technologies and skills/qualities are in line with the espoused values, then the actual culture is much more likely to be reflective of management's preferred culture.

For more information, review the following links:

1. About Human Synergistics
2. The Human Synergistics Circumplex
3. The Human Synergistics Integrated Development System
4. The Organisational Development Model - how structures, systems, technologies and skills/qualities affect to organisational culture
5. The Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) - measuring organisational culture and behaviour
6. The Organisational Effectiveness Inventory (OEI) - measuring the impact of structures, systems, technologies and skills/qualities
7. Our client experience