LAW
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CREATE A COMMON DREAM
IMAGINE WINNING. SEE VIVIDLY in your mind’s eye what success looks like—and then let that vision animate your entire team. Tackling challenges on the journey to a common goal is a natural way for team members to come to trust one another. On the other hand, failing to articulate a common dream or a vision of success almost ensures finger-pointing when the inevitable setbacks occur.
At the world-class level, a hairbreadth often separates the gold-medal winner from the runner-up. Many Olympians, even in events that focus on individual performance—sprints, weightlifting, diving—say that trusting teammates and coaches to achieve a common goal accounted in large part for their ability to make the sacrifices required to achieve their dreams.
Olympians describe being driven through long hours of training and deprivation by imagining a place on the medals stand. A team of twelve-year-old baseball players dreams of winning a Little League World Series trophy. A triathlete envisions crossing the finish line to a loudspeaker blaring, “You are an Ironman!” And a jockey, an owner, and a horse trainer imagine joining forces to win the Kentucky Derby.
Athletic dreams are most inspiring when they’re more than a generalized hope for success. It’s the same with organizational objectives. The most effective ones are tangible images that help people push through inevitable disappointments. While organizational visions may not be as vivid as the image of a spot on the podium, they should be tangible.
Keep these six ideas in mind as you create and refine an overarching vision, mission, or dream:
1. Make your mission inclusive. All organizations have multiple constituencies, including employees, customers, investors, and communities served. Articulating a purpose that brings these constituencies together is a good starting point for organizational vision. The goal is to find something of consequence that all stakeholders can root for. Consider again the vision of a team in the Olympics. Winning a medal is a goal everyone can get behind, from the athletes and their families to the coaches, the fans, and even the sponsors.
Many leaders limit the mission of public companies to maximizing profits or growing at a particular rate. But profits and growth are not missions; profits are the result of delivering something customers want at a price that represents real value to them. The mission is to uniquely serve customers and create value. Those are goals that people can trust. If you come up with a mission like the one Olympic athletes use to inspire their quest for gold, profits and growth should follow. Today’s information workers are volunteers—they want to own the reason for their labor.
2. Having a mission means more than having a mission statement. We’ve all seen executive-crafted mission statements, full of jargon and lofty language. Businesses like to claim they’re “changing the world” thanks to “forward-thinking products” and “unimpeachable integrity.” What companies frequently miss is that attempts at being aspirational and inspirational can come off as interchangeable and irrelevant—and, in the worst case, can create cynicism.
Unless your mission statement expresses unique ways people can be (a) respected members of (b) a winning team (c) doing something meaningful, you may as well go to the online Mission Statement Generator, where you can combine an adverb, an adjective, a noun, and a conjunctive with an opener and a closer to yield a meaningless mission statement.
Make sure your team participates in generating the statement, and make sure it is around what the organization actually does. In other words, make the process participatory and the outcome specific. Recognize, too, that a mission statement does not guarantee a mission. Many trust-poor organizations have mission statements that exclude significant stakeholders. Crafting a coherent, ambitious, and realistic mission brings many stakeholders together, allowing each to contribute color, texture, and meaning. The very process of talking about mission can help stamp out the political maneuvering and mistrust among stakeholders that would otherwise fill the natural vacuum of a missionless organization. And that process should create a podium on which everyone in the organization can stand.
3. Collect and celebrate “hero stories.” People tend to think inductively, that is, from the specific to the general. The anecdote tells the larger tale and animates the mission for everyone. Journalists use stories of individuals to explain complex issues. So do presidents during State of the Union addresses, in which they point up to the gallery and call out the soldier who rescued a brother on the battlefield. Part of reinforcing a mission is honoring those in the organization who advance its overarching goals.
“Hero stories” can provide a powerful example of an organization’s vision in action. In Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them, Scott Allison and George Goethals provide a thoughtful, well-researched survey on the psychology of heroes in both history and fiction. Portraits of such characters as Lincoln, Churchill, Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Ernest Shackleton—and even Rick Blaine in Casablanca—illustrate the connection between heroism and leadership.
JetBlue collects stories of crewmembers who go the extra mile for customers. To remind everyone of the mission of “bringing humanity back to air travel,” I’ve opened board meetings by reading compelling letters from grateful customers.
I recall giving talks every year at Trammell Crow Company about employees who personified our values. One year I decided to change my stump speech, leaving out one of the more colorful stories that everyone had already heard about a partner who had gone the extra mile for a client. In more than one city, people came up to me afterward to grumble, “You forgot to tell the story about how one partner delighted a tenant!” Clearly, everyone already knew the story, and yet they wanted to hear it again. Call it company folklore. There’s a reason stories of individual team members’ exemplifying the values of the organization in achieving its mission become institutional memory. Members of high-trust teams love these tangible reminders of “why we’re different.”
4. Replace an aging vision. As organizations grow, the big picture tends to blur. Early passions fade. Bureaucracies emerge. People are less eager to come to work if they don’t know what they’re working toward, or if they sense the enterprise has not refreshed its purpose. When NBA commissioner Adam Silver in summer 2015 redrew the league’s long-standing and too-long mission statement, he elevated it to a “calling.” Silver framed the NBA’s role through a more expansive, and inclusive, lens that would inspire the league’s followers to “compete with intensity, lead with integrity, and inspire play.”
If you can no longer express your organization’s vision in a simple, irresistible way, you’ve probably drifted off track. That means it’s time to refocus—not just the vision but also the organization itself. The goal: Every member of the team should have a direct line of sight to the podium.
5. Don’t think small—do think simple. Pick a goal that the team will be proud to achieve. Whether it’s building a new product or serving a community in need, individuals want tangible objectives to move toward, not vague problems to maneuver away from. If the goal is just to avoid a bad outcome, the results of any sacrifice required to achieve the dream will be less motivating and less likely to result in enduring trust among colleagues.
As a leader, keep your team focused on a clear, compelling, and limited set of big goals—ideally, no more than three. You should be the guardian and evangelist of your organization’s priorities; it’s up to you to keep them in neon letters so all employees can see what you’re all about. At Microsoft, for decades, that meant putting “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Amazon began with the goal to offer “every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” Pepsi famously wanted to “Beat Coke.” JetBlue was founded with a mission to bring humanity back to air travel. Churchill’s “V” sign during World War II was the symbol of his single-minded objective: victory.
6. Expect great dreams to require sacrifice. It’s difficult to imagine a meaningful dream without some level of sacrifice. People make sacrifices in all successful organizations, in all healthy relationships, at every stage of life. In most functional families, bonds grow and strengthen precisely because so much is required—and given. We tend to love those things for which, and people for whom, we’ve sacrificed. So, if you want to achieve a meaningful outcome, don’t be afraid of sacrifice. But the dream must be one leaders are willing to sacrifice for as well. The novelist Peter Beagle put it nicely (if a bit graphically) in The Last Unicorn: “Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
Fortunately, the kinds of sacrifices required have intrinsic benefits. But remember that asking for sacrifice is not a “technique” to build trust. Life in organizations is not a blind-trust kind of exercise, in which you ask people to follow you into a dense forest. Instead, you’re asking people to give of themselves for something they believe in.
When you’ve got the dream right, people commit to its achievement in ways that will surprise you. Young entrepreneurs will forgo a normal social life, locking themselves in the proverbial garage to gain the hundreds of extra hours they need to build a product the world doesn’t yet have. And when it comes to a family’s mission, parents will give up valuable mid-career time to be closer to their growing kids.
Naturally, the topic of sacrifice feels a bit risky when creating a common dream. No matter your own sacrifices, you don’t want to be a slave driver or to demand more than people can reasonably give. But if you have integrity, if you show respect, if you offer responsibility and take it yourself, if you show what the mile markers are, and if the vision is clear and widely held, you’ll be surprised at the sacrifices people are willing to make. If people trust their leaders, their colleagues, and themselves, they’ll be more than willing to take the extra risk, to stay the extra hour, to sacrifice the routine for the remarkable.
One dramatic example: Starbucks had enjoyed years of breakneck expansion when Howard Schultz retired as its CEO in 2007. But within a few years, Schultz emailed his successor, as well as senior management, to lament the “commoditization of our brand” and “the watering down of the Starbucks experience.” In early 2008, with the company in a potential death spiral and takeover vultures hovering, Schultz decided to return as CEO, and he called for sacrifice.
With both the earnestness and the bravado he’d become known for, he used sacrifice as a way to get everyone’s attention. He quickly shut down eight hundred underperforming U.S. stores, letting go four thousand employees. Some long-standing and cherished benefits were cut back. Other steps were less structural but dramatic nonetheless. For three and a half hours, at a cost of $6 million in lost revenue, all Starbucks stores closed so baristas could be retrained at the espresso machine.
At the end of it all, and at a cost of some $30 million, Schultz brought ten thousand store managers together in New Orleans for a weeklong pep rally and to put in fifty thousand hours of community service for Hurricane Katrina cleanup. In relatively short order, Starbucks turned around to reclaim its position as a beloved brand and a valued place to work. Although the company’s pivot was not, of course, solely due to Schultz’s immediate moves (nor was it without challenges), his call was an overall repositioning of Starbucks’s internal culture, as well as of its public image. At a low point, shared sacrifice pulled the Starbucks team together, and the returning Schultz reestablished a trust that had ebbed during his absence. The common dream was restored and trust levels increased.
MOST PEOPLE WANT TO feel they’re working toward a goal that is concrete, important, and lasting—not just working their way through a series of repetitive tasks. Trust is far more likely to develop when a shared dream brings each member of the team together in pursuit of something meaningful, especially when they have shaped and therefore own it. (I’ve even seen teams in turnarounds band together around things like “losing less money this month than we lost last.”)
When people can rally around a common goal, reaching for a summit that’s consistent with their values, they’ll sacrifice together, lift each others’ burdens, and do their utmost not to let each other down. Such are the characteristics of high-trust organizations that follow the laws of trust in pursuit of a common dream.
Perhaps the most vivid example of creating a common dream can be found in a talk given by Anson Dorrance, the longtime head coach of women’s soccer at the University of North Carolina. He’s one of the most successful athletic leaders in history, guiding UNC to twenty-two national championships. In a revealing video clip at www.whatdriveswinning.com, he talks about his team “playing for something bigger than themselves”—“for the person on their left, the person on their right, the person behind, and the person in front of them.” Dorrance explains that if his team reaches the national championship game, he spends that weekend “writing a letter to every senior on my roster thanking her for the incredible human contribution she’s made to my team.”
Before the big game, he hands out the letters to the seniors, then asks them to leave the locker room. He reads photocopies of the letters to the remaining players to show the “extraordinary human beings” they’re playing for. One such senior was Caroline Boneparth, the daughter of Peter Boneparth, with whom I serve on the JetBlue board. (Caroline allowed her letter to be included in Coaching Wisdom, a recent book about athletic leaders, so the letter isn’t private anymore.) Nicknamed “Care” by the coach, Caroline wasn’t a star. She rarely played. But she was a captain nonetheless. In his letter to her, Dorrance wrote that Caroline “was both steel and velvet. . . . This is you. You are so strong and sweet and I cherish you for it. Thank you for taking ‘care’ of everyone for four wonderful years. I am going to miss you.” Who would not be inspired to play their hardest for Caroline? Who would not want to be led by Anson Dorrance?