What mission is your team on - do they know?

What mission is your team on – do they know?

I’m a bit obsessed with Army Seal Teams and other elite Special Forces teams.  I’m obsessed with them because of the effect and impact having absolute clarity on the mission they are about to embark on has for them.  This is when they are ‘on’ as a team.

You notice that they have clear rules of engagement, not only with the mission but with each other.  They behave in an extremely specific, agreed way to ensure that they will achieve the mission and be ‘whole’ at the end of it and have achieved success.  These teams have a noticeable clear line of leadership so in the event of the top leader being unavailable or incapacitated, the succession plan comes into play.  The mission is not compromised.

Then you see the contrast of these teams when they are ‘off’ – back at base and you can start to see a few of their individualistic traits come out.

So, what fascinates me is the way these teams navigate between being ‘on’ a mission and ‘off’ and back at home base.  The difference I believe is that they have absolute clarity of mission.  Once the orders have come down, they plan their approach and figure out their tactical plan.  They are now ready to go.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Why are we here?

If we are to think about our own teams, how clear are they on their mission?  In other words, how clear are they on answering the question, why are we here?

There’s a great quote from Alexander Hamilton, “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything” and this is so true for not only individuals but for teams.  In the absence of being clear on what the mission is, people will make stuff up!  With the best intentions of course, but their made-up mission or goal might not be what you want or need.  Osmosis is not a good strategy for formulating a mission – people won’t just ‘pick it up’ as they go along.  As leaders, we need to be explicit and very clear, so people don’t have to do unnecessary mental gymnastics to try and figure it out for themselves.

Teams (and individuals) have a fundamental need to understand the question ‘why are we (I) here?’ so they can see where they ‘fit’ and how they will contribute to the bigger picture or mission.  When we don’t have clarity of mission, we run the risk of our teams being misaligned or pursuing their own agenda because we haven’t been clear around what we expect from them and what the end goal is.

Reaching hearts and minds

Mission (or Purpose) provides the critical foundation for all high-performing teams.   From this place of clarity, the team is then able to deal with the tactical plan of how to get from A to B.  It’s also easier for them to determine roles and responsibilities so the team can work best together given the outcomes they are trying to achieve.

Simon Sinek in his popular Ted Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action talks about the fact the people don’t buy what you do, but why you do it.  The same can be said for your team.  The team will connect to a mission or project more if they fully understand why it is important – the what and the how are often pretty easy.

This is where the challenge can come in.  Teams are not always used to thinking about the why.  When they get together to do this, they invariably end out defaulting back to the what and the how but that won’t grab hearts and minds.  The most inspiring leaders have found a way to connect their teams to the why.

 Cascading mission / purpose

As we move through the organisation, we can sometimes find that communicating the company-level mission becomes a little hard for teams and individuals to connect with and see how that is directly relevant for them on a day-to-day basis.  To ensure the mission or purpose is relevant to everyone at their various levels in the organisation, I suggest a cascading approach so that everyone has a clear line of sight back to the company’s overarching Vision.

So how do we do this?

Here are some practical discussion tips you can use to gain clarity with your team around your teams’ mission or purpose:

1. What is the service or product you are providing?

2. Is your product or service focused on the customer and who are they?

3. How will you deliver that product or service to your customers?

4. What is the quality level or standard your team will perform at when providing the service or product and what does that look like?

5. What difference will your product or service make for your customer?

6. Why is that difference important – what will that add, create or do for your customer and your team?

Other considerations

• These discussions always take a bit longer than you think. You don’t want to rush them and treat it like a ticking the box exercise – that will actually do you more damage than good. So, allow time for more than one discussion.

• Give your teams really clear information around the ‘context’ for the discussion and what you hope to achieve in terms of outcomes.

• Make sure you give your people plenty of time to ponder before the discussions so give them a ‘heads up’ on what will happen in the discussion.

• This is a creative discussion where everyone should be contributing so choose a different setting to your normal teams’ meetings if this is something you haven’t done a lot of in the past.

• There can be times when having someone from outside the team facilitate this conversation is of benefit and it allows all team members, including the leader, to contribute to the session without having to worry about facilitating the discussion. It can be hard for someone to wear two hats (facilitator and contributor) if they are already in the team.

These are some of the most valuable conversations you will have with your team.  They are also ongoing conversations as opposed to the one-off monolithic event that everyone labels as ‘that weird thing we did that time’ or the ‘flavour or the month’ thing.  What we want are conversations that flow from the top of the organisation all the way through the business that has a clear line of sight to the vision of the company.

Need some help?

If you are looking to increase the performance and results of your team, we should chat to see if my Creating a Winning Team programme would be of interest to you.