Mission Impossible

I don’t know about you, but I’m frequently asked to set personal, quarterly performance goals. I normally think through how I want to learn and grow in the next quarter and tie them to projects that I know are coming.

Shifting gears slightly—I’ve been reading about organizational structures that create and sustain culture. A company’s mission, strategy, and goals are extremely important not only to business success, but also to setting expectations for what’s important internally and externally. Employees know exactly where the business is heading and why, so if a change is made, they can tie it to the stated mission. If something is off, they’re able to pinpoint where the organization might be failing them. “Mission and strategy is not only what the leadership has told other people that the organization is doing, but also what the people believe the organization is doing” (Burke & Litwin 1992, p. 531). 

Because a mission can highly impact culture and people might feel the need to adopt the mission as their own in a given environment, it’s considered highly transformational (Burke & Litwin 1992).

However, even though working for an organization I’m letting these key things impact and transform the way I interact in that culture, I never fully adopt them as my own. In my entire career, I’ve never considered tying my own individual performance goals to an organization’s mission, strategy, or goals.

I’m excited as a coach to help people fully understand how existing in a culture and utilizing that culture in marriage with personal growth can be transformative. I want to challenge others to adopt part of their organization’s mission more formally into their own personal goals—since, by the way, those things are affecting their behavior silently anyways—and see how their own performance might be emphasized or energize the culture they’re a part of.

Burke, W. W., & Litwin, G. H. (1992). A causal model of organizational performance and change. Journal of Management, 18(3), 523-545.