Page 70 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

You Better Believe It 51

In the case of the technicians, the team members were unable to explore
the depths of their true purpose and decide what values were important to
them. We challenged them to go back and rethink their original draft, which
they begrudgingly agreed to do.
After a few weeks, we reconvened. The leader of the technician team stood
up and said, “When you asked us to go back and rethink our mission, we
thought, “What’s the point? It’s only a bunch of words.” But then we began
discussing our values and listening to everyone’s opinions on how we served
our business partners.”
The result was that when the team seriously answered the mission ques-
tions we posed in the earlier meeting, their values became crystallized and
were evidenced by the inspired words in their new statement.
The important point to this story is that this team of hourly technicians
had the motivation and conviction to reexamine critical aspects of how they
do business without any supervision from management. This was a team
that had fared poorly on all of the team categories, from goal-setting to con-
flict, by which they were benchmarked during their initial year of teaming.
However, largely as a result of a visionary mission statement clearly aligned
with company values, they made incredible advances within the next two
years, perhaps more than any other team in the entire organization, while at
the same time increasing the productivity of the entire department.
That’s not to say that aligning team missions with the organizational
vision is an easy task. It isn’t. But with a little effort, you can come up with a
system that allows you to integrate short-term activities with your longer-term
vision. In tackling what we refer to as Vision Align, you will realize a number
of benefits, such as:

■ Creating an established process for executing strategy
■ Increasing departmental cooperation
■ Giving your leadership a mechanism by which to understand key
problem areas
■ Enabling quicker, more accurate feedback

The concept of Vision Align involves setting up a structure that will allow
your organization’s overall objectives to cascade down through the various staff
levels to the natural work group. We worked with a manufacturing team that
used Vision Align to illustrate the process. (Figure 3-1 illustrates the Vision
Align process for a client manufacturing team.)