Establishing Accountability: Promoting and Fulfilling the Mission

In my last post, I walked through my process for establishing the mission for my new Solutions team. However, as anyone who has worked in an organization that failed to “walk the talk” of their mission statement knows, a mission statement is meaningless without concrete actions to substantiate it. 

If you declare a mission statement in the forest, does it get lost in the brush? 

Substantiation of our new mission statement required three steps:

Step 1: Promote the New Mission Internally

It was critical to post the new Mission Statement in highly visible ways. These included an internal blog post, a new opening slide for all internal decks, and adding it to the onboarding curriculum for new hires. 

Step 2: Ensure the team owns the new mission

I wanted my team to understand how seriously we would take the new mission statement.  I introduced the mission during our internal sync. My presentation included a summary of what I heard during my listening tour. We unpacked and discussed each takeaway and how our mission addressed the lessons learned from the listening tour.  Later on, I revisited the discussion during 1:1’s. The mission statement would then become a mantra that I repeated whenever there was a question about a request that had come our way, i.e., “HOW do we respond here as the owners of the company’s technical relationship with this client?”

Step 3: Declare your accountability

Our internal constituents needed to understand how the new mission would inform my Solutions team’s work with them. Achieving such understanding was necessary for the mission to gain traction truly. Each of our three constituent teams needed to hear the a reinterpretation of our mission as it pertained to their worlds. The most prevalent concern I heard on the listening tour was the uncertainty surrounding when to engage the Solutions team. My ultimate goal for each group was to remove the uncertainty once and for all.  The interpretation for each group was as follows:

• For Sales: Solutions is your partner for EVERY opportunity. 

• For Client Success: Solutions is your first stop for any technical questions with clients.

• For Delivery/Operations: Solutions owns technical implementations. 

I recognized that positioning my team in this way would expose us to many requests that were not our responsibility, e.g., No, Solutions cannot help with HIPAA compliance, or Sorry, we can’t set up that virtual workstation. However, the effort required to triage, and then redirect such requests was minimal. More importantly, we were involved in many more client engagements than in months past. And that added exposure was the gold at the end of the rainbow for my Solutions team. Within a couple of months, Solutions partnerships became a standard feature at our company, and people embraced them as it they had been in place since Day 1.