Leading Organizations & People _Graduate Level

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** Conducting Research on Your Organization

If at any point in this project you find yourself wanting information about your organization that is not publicly available, it is important to discuss the situation and your proposed solution with your professor. Your professor will help you explore the best approach for your particular organization and situation. One possible outcome of this discussion may be an agreement to make some minor modifications to the project report. Modifications must be approved by your professor.

In most cases, you will want to discuss your project with your employer and explain that you are completing this organizational profile as one requirement for your MBA. You should explain that this assignment does not require you to disclose any proprietary or sensitive information about the organization. Our experience is that managers are generally happy to support their employees and also look forward to benefiting from the results of projects like this one.

You will likely want to begin by reviewing annual reports and other publicly available information. You will have other opportunities in this program to apply what you are learning to your organization, and it is therefore important that you take care in planning and implementing your research for this project and in communicating about it with others.

 

**Creating an Organizational Fact Sheet

Fact sheets vary depending upon the organization and intended audience. For the purposes of this project, your fact sheet should be a one-page overview of important information any new or prospective employee or board member would find helpful. You should adapt the fact sheet you create to fit your specific organization.

Organizations in the nonprofit sector use varyinglanguage and approaches to share similar important types of information. To see an example, you can look for the Facts section or About section on the website of the American Red Cross or United Way.

If you scan the Internet for organizational fact sheets, you will find many different templates and examples. You will also find that different types of organizations use different labels for the areas on their websites where they share information. Corporations sometimes use an About page to share information of general interest to all stakeholders and then create a one-page fact sheet targeted primarily at investors. To see examples, search the corporate website of companies like Exxon Mobil or IBM.

Those who work in large government departments may find many different fact sheets. For example , if you search the About section one the US State Department website, you will probably find yourself on a page intended as a starting place for people interested in a career. If you work for a small or new business that does not yet have a fact sheet, you might find the toolkit for small- and medium-size enterprises on the International Monetary Fund’s website helpful.

Fact sheets typically provide information that can be independently verified (i.e., facts), while About pages convey something about the organization’s intended purpose and areas of focus. In it’s simpliest form, a fact sheet focuses primarily on presenting key facts about the organization, but it might also link to the organization’s mission, vision, values, and strategy.

Below are examples of information you may wish to include in a one-page fact sheet:

· name of organization

· location

· when organization was created

· legal status

· focus

· purpose, products, or services

· size (i.e., number of employees)

· leadership (i.e., CEO and members of the executive leadership team)

· mission and vision

· other important facts appropriate for your organization

 

 

Legal Forms of Organization

An organization may operate in one of several sectors, which determines its legal form of organization. The following questions can help clarify what legal form of organization a company or initiative has.

Which sector is your organization operating in: private, public (i.e., government), or nonprofit?

· If private, review Law in Business (Varner, 2007), located in the Resources section below, to determine which of the following best describes your organization:

· proprietorship

· partnership

· corporation

· If public (government), which of the following best describes your organization:

· federal

· state

· local

· If a nonprofit organization see A Nonprofit Organization (Dicke, 2011), located in the Resources section below. This article provides some general information about the sector and can help you determine its tax status. Many organizations will likely qualify as a 501(c)(3), which is the most common type of nonprofit. If you have an interest in learning more, you might want to explore some of the websites that provide useful information about this sector. One example is the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), which provides information and research about the sector. Another potentially useful resource is the Charity Navigator, which helps contributors understand the different types of 501(c) organizations and their status for tax purposes. Of course, another very useful source is the IRS website. If, for example, you work for a trade or professional association—a 501(c)(6)—you could search the IRS site for the term business leagues.

 

Stakeholders

There are many individuals and groups who have a stake in what an organization does and in how well it does it. Stakeholder theory proposes that organizational performance relies on recognition and inclusion of key stakeholders in the organization’s major decisions. The need to manage stakeholders effectively is an important responsibility and potential challenge for leaders and managers (Fassin, 2012; Loi, 2016).

Read the article Stakeholder located in the resources section below for more about what a stakeholder is and why this is important to recognize all stakeholders.

References

Fassin, Y. (2012). Stakeholder management, reciprocity and stakeholder responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 109(1), 83–96. doi:10.1007/s10551-012-1381-8

Loi, T. H. (2016). Stakeholder management: A case of its related capability and performance. Management Decision, 54(1), 148–173. doi:10.1108/MD-06-2015-0244

 

Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals

Mission and vision both relate to an organization’s purpose and are typically communicated in some written form. Mission and vision are statements from the organization that answer questions about who the organization is, what it values, and where it’s going. A study by the consulting firm Bain and Company reports that 90 percent of the 500 firms surveyed issue some form of mission and vision statements (Bart & Baetz, 1998). Moreover, firms with a clearly communicated, widely understood, and collectively shared mission and vision have been shown to perform better than those without them, with the caveat that these statements related to effectiveness only when strategy, goals, and objectives were aligned with them as well (Bart, Bontis, & Taggar, 2001).

A mission statement communicates the organization’s reason for being, and details how it aims to serve its key stakeholders. Customers, employees, and investors are the stakeholders most often emphasized, but other stakeholders, like government or communities (relating to social or environmental impact), can also be discussed. Mission statements are often longer than vision statements. Sometimes, mission statements also include a summation of the firm’s values, or beliefs in which the organization is emotionally invested. The Starbucks mission statement, for example, has described four guiding principles that also communicate the organization’s values (Starbucks, n.d.):

· creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome.

· acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other.

· being present, connecting with transparency, dignity and respect.

· delivering our very best in all we do, holding ourselves accountable for results.

A vision statement, in contrast, is a future-oriented declaration of the organization’s purpose and aspirations. The mission statement lays out the organization’s “purpose for being,” and the vision statement then says, “based on that purpose, this is what we want to become.” Strategy should be directly based on the organization’s vision, since the strategy is intended to achieve the vision and thereby satisfy the organization’s mission. Typically, vision statements are brief. Sometimes the vision statement is also captured in a short tag line, such as Toyota’s “Let’s Go Places” statement that appears in most communications to customers, suppliers, and employees. Similarly, Wal-Mart’s tag-line version of its vision statement is “Save money. Live better.”

Any casual tour of business or organization websites will expose you to the range of forms that mission and vision statements can take. To reiterate, mission statements are longer than vision statements, often because they convey the organization’s core values. Mission statements answer the questions, Who are we? and What does our organization value? Vision statements typically take the form of relatively brief, future-oriented statements and answer the question, Where is this organization going? Increasingly, organizations also add a values statement, which either reaffirms or states outright the organization’s values that might not be evident in the mission or vision statements.

Roles Played by Mission and Vision

Mission and vision statements play three critical roles: (1) communicate the purpose of the organization to stakeholders, (2) inform strategy development, and (3) develop the measurable goals and objectives by which to gauge the success of the organization’s strategy. These interdependent, cascading roles, and the relationships among them, are summarized in the figure below.

Key Roles of Mission and Vision

First, mission and vision provide a vehicle for communicating an organization’s purpose and values to all key stakeholders. Stakeholders are those key parties who have some influence over the organization or stake in its future, including employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and institutions such as governments. Typically, these statements are widely circulated and discussed often so that their meaning is broadly understood, shared, and internalized. The better employees understand an organization’s purpose, through its mission and vision, the more able they will be to understand the strategy and its implementation.

Second, mission and vision create a target for strategy development. One criterion of a good strategy is how well it helps the firm achieve its mission and vision. To better understand the relationship among mission, vision, and strategy, it is sometimes helpful to visualize them collectively as a funnel. At the broadest part of the funnel, you find the inputs into the mission statement. Toward the narrower part of the funnel, you find the vision statement, which has distilled the mission in a way that it can guide the development of strategy. In the narrowest part of the funnel, you find the strategy—it is clear and explicit about what the firm will do, and not do, to achieve the vision.

Vision statements also provide a bridge between the mission and the strategy. In that sense, the best vision statements create a tension and restlessness with regard to the status quo. They foster a spirit of continuous innovation and improvement. London Business School professors Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad (1993) describe this tense relationship between vision and strategy as stretch and ambition. Indeed, in a study of CNN, British Airways, and Sony, they found that these firms displaced competitors with stronger reputations and deeper pockets through their ambition to stretch their organizations in more innovative ways.

Mission, Vision, Strategy, Goals and Objectives for Stakeholders

Third, mission and vision provide a high-level guide, and the strategy provides a specific guide to the goals and objectives showing success or failure of the strategy and satisfaction of the larger set of objectives stated in the mission. In the cases of both Starbucks and Toyota, you would expect to see profitability goals, in addition to metrics on customer and employee satisfaction, and social and environmental responsibility.

Conclusion

Mission and vision both relate to an organization’s purpose and aspirations, and are typically communicated in some form of brief written statements. A mission statement communicates the organization’s reason for being and how it aspires to serve its key stakeholders. The vision statement is a narrower, future-oriented declaration of the organization’s purpose and aspirations. Together, mission and vision guide strategy development, help communicate the organization’s purpose to stakeholders, and inform the goals and objectives set to determine whether the strategy is on track.

References

Bart, C. K., & Baetz, M. C. (1998). The relationship between mission statements and firm performance: An exploratory study. Journal of Management Studies, 35, 823–853.

Bart, C. K., Bontis, N., & Taggar, S. (2001). A model of the impact of mission statements on firm performance. Management Decision, 39(1), 19–35.

Hamel, G., & Prahalad, C. K. (1993, March–April). Strategy as stretch and leverage. Harvard Business Review, 75–84.

Starbucks. (n.d.) Our mission. Retrieved from https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/mission-statement

 

 

Mission

An organization should have a clearly defined mission that guides decisions and (along with an organizational vision) future directions. While organizations’ missions are typically stable, changes in scope and sometimes even purpose do occur. Sometimes these changes are intentional, and the rationale is easy to discover. but sometimes this is not the case. A common occurrence known as mission creep can happen when an organization’s scope expands, often incrementally, in a direction that was not originally intended. You will also see changes in mission caused by market expansion or contraction, mergers and acquisitions, innovation, changing societal needs, and so on.

Another common occurrence, known as mission proliferation, can happen when different parts of the organization articulate and publish independent missions, often to help inspire and direct those working in subunits. In theory, each subunit mission statement should align with and support the organization’s mission, but this is not always the case and deviations from the organization’s mission may contribute to confusion. This outcome may be especially true in organizations that are large and complex, or in ones where decision making is decentralized.

An organization’s mission may be found in a formal published statement or explained verbally be the CEO or another senior leader. Public sector organizations sometimes have two organizational mission statements—an official version that is long and detailed, and an abbreviated version used for public dissemination. A mission can change over time, and it can be instructive to examine the process used the bring about that change. It is also useful to ask whether there is evidence an organization’s mission is having a positive impact on its performance.

 

Deducing a Mission

You may find your organization does not have a formal written mission statement. Alternatively, you might find there is such a statement, but that it does not seem to reflect what your organization is doing.

As Cavanagh (2008) suggests in the article you just read about missions and mission statements, if you find one of these situations applies to you, try to deduce the mission by answering the following questions:

· Who are we as an organization?

· What do we do?

· Why do we do it?

· What should we be doing?

· What do we stand for?

Once you have decided what your organization’s mission is, you will then want to verify your conclusions to ensure what you include in your report is as accurate as possible:

· Is there evidence that the majority of the organization’s resources are committed to the purpose you have identified?

· Is there evidence that key organizational stakeholders know what the organization’s purpose is?

· Is there evidence these stakeholders agree on the organization’s purpose?

· Do the organization’s leaders speak about this purpose?

References

Cavanagh, G. (2008). Missions and mission statements. In R. W. Kolb (Ed.), Encyclopedia of business ethics and society. doi: 10.4135/9781412956260.n523. Retrieved from (http://sk.sagepub.com.ezproxy.umgc.edu/reference/ethics/n523.xml)

 

Goal Setting

You may find your organization has a set of major, strategic goals designed to help ensure that its mission and vision for the future are accomplished. These goals are sometimes clearly articulated, communicated widely, and incorporated in annual performance reviews. The following questions are often pertinent when analyzing an organization’s goals:

· Have the goals been created with input from key stakeholder groups within the organization?

· Do the goals align with and support the organization’s mission, vision, and values?

· Are the goals widely communicated and understood by key stakeholders?

· Are they reviewed regularly and revised in light of changing situations and priorities?

· Are they supported with the necessary resources?

· Are the goals operationalized in the form of specific and measurable objectives?

· Do the goals result in specific intended actions?

There are several common challenges associated with goal setting, including lack of clarity, inadequate communication to all key stakeholders, creation of multiple competing or conflicting goals, and goals that are either too specific or too broad. Additionally, unintentionally (and sometimes intentionally) setting goals that are likely not achievable can create incentives to cut corners or make poor or unethical decisions (Kayes, 2005). As Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, and Bazerman (2009) write, a classic example of this situation is the decision by Lee Iacocca, then CEO of the Ford Motor Company, to set an overly ambitious and unrealistic goal that resulted in production of the Ford Pinto, with dire consequences.

Sometimes you will find the terms goals and strategic objectives used interchangeably. When considering goal setting, your main interest is in determining whether an organization has articulated specific and measurable benchmarks it will accomplishto get where it wants and needs to go.

Read the Encyclopedia of Management entry on goals and goal setting in the Resources section below for more information.

 

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