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HR PRACTICES AND PROCESSES THAT MAKE SUSTAINABLE VALUES STICK 51

■ Perception is reality. Learning to listen and accept feedback in others required
each person on the management team to comprehend this concept deeply, which is
not an easy thing to do.
■ The perfect is the enemy of the good, even in visionary companies. A vision that
seems well-shy of ideal but has 100 percent buy-in by the entire management team
is likely to be much more effective than an ideal vision that no one can get his or
her hands around.
■ Process can be more important than outcome. How a company’s management
team approaches various decisions, whom it includes, the respect it accords dis-
parate voices, the time it devotes to thoroughly analyze all aspects of a question—
these say volumes about what the management team truly stands for, much more so
than the rhetoric of a mission or vision statement.

Individually, the members of the management team underwent leadership training.
They followed up this training with a 360-degree survey of the entire company that
focused on questions of management and leadership. Then the management team
spent three days together looking at the feedback and working on a specific action plan
of continues–starts–stops that enumerated the various things each person needed to
continue doing, start doing, and/or stop doing to become more effective as a team and
as a business.
As the management team began to understand each other better through dialogue
and assessments, they also began to understand that this was not a one-off exercise but
a paradigm change in the way they would work together from this point on. The work
environment at Melaver, Inc. was always going to be fast-moving with high expecta-
tions. Resilience and adaptation were necessary. So, too, was a collective vision state-
ment that everyone in the company could say he or she had a hand in, could agree
upon, and could support. And so, within a year of when Martin first drafted his vision
statement for the rest of the company, the management group met as a team to envi-
sion things together.

Collective Visioning
Envisioning is the hardest step of all in strategic planning because it requires one to
journey away from day-to-day routines and into a world of possibilities without judg-
ment of what will or won’t work. Dreaming about what you could be means you have
to allow your right brain to envision something you may never achieve, even as it is
what wakes you every morning as you strive toward that vision. It calls for a willing-
ness to be vulnerable with one another, a willingness that was probably in short sup-
ply when the management team first began to meet.
The exercise of envisioning also brings out differences among team members. It
shows where people are focused, the direction in which they want to go, and the dif-
ferences of those views. My job was to keep them focused until they could develop a
consensus on a vision for the future. The way to successful envisioning is to value all
opinions, honor the past, and move toward a future together. Their work together for