Three dimensions of effective mission implementation

“The mission has been implemented in my company, but I’m not seen any change, why? What went wrong? It has been effective?”. The following article aims to clarify these questions and explain how to do an effective implementation of the mission.

Mission statements are an important tool for strategy implementation, but in many companies, there are difficulties to put in practice because the lack of motivation related to the mission. Why? We must consider the three dimensions of the mission development: formal, dynamic and motivational, three dimensions to consider in an effective mission implementation: authenticity, coherence and integrity.

The formal dimension of the mission represents the explicit knowledge that members of an organisation have their own mission. Is the essence of the “why” usually explicated in the corporate mission.

The dynamic dimension of the mission reflects the fulfilment of the mission, that is, how it is carried out in practice. What matters in the dynamic mission is therefore the extent to which or how the company fulfils its formal mission.

The motivational dimension of the mission is the prosocial motivation linked to the mission, the understanding of the “why” of an organisation linked to the personal motives. It is translated in terms of “customer satisfaction”, “contribution to society” or “employee development”.

The unitary three-dimensional nature of a mission raises the question of the “fit” or consistency  and non-contradiction between the various dimensions. We identify three forms of consistency.

The first one is that between the formal and motivational mission, the fit between what the company states as its mission and what really motivates its members (what the company “says” it wants and what its members “truly” want). In this sense, we may say that it determines the “authenticity” of mission. We can refer to a mission as authentic when it is “real” in the sense that it is “truly” lived by the individuals.

The second form of consistency is that between the motivational dimension and the dynamic dimension of the mission or the fit between what truly motivates people and what they actually do in their daily practice (operations and processes). This form of consistency gives the mission “integrity”.

Finally, the consistency between the dynamic and formal missions defines the coherence of the mission, that is, the degree of alignment between what is done in practice (dynamic mission) and what the company declares as its mission (formal mission).

You can have the true knowledge of what a mission is only when you consider the complete ‘model’ with the three dimensions defined, aligned and practiced.

DPMC will help you to carry out a complete and effective implementation of your mission, generating the cultural changes to improve unity and increase profit, measuring at all times the objectives and benefits achieved.

Summary of the article of Carlos Rey and Miquel Bastons published in LPR Elsevier, August 2017.
Access to the complete article in:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024630117300109