Establishing Purpose
This article was adapted from Chapter 9: Establishing Purpose of Michael Iannini’s book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Realizing the Full Potential of Middle Leaders.
“Identity represents the story that a group tells itself to organize its values and beliefs. A group’s beliefs determine its behavior. Collectively, its behavior affects student learning.”
— Robert Dilts
An organization’s vision addresses the question of “why” and tells a compelling story of what it will look like when that vision is actualized. An organization’s mission is like a load-bearing support; it provides guidance to management for how it should develop strategies to realize the vision. School strategy is meant to be responsive to the short- and long-term operating environment, market conditions, and changing demographics that the school must respond to in order to realize its vision.
Teams are tasked with implementing the strategy; therefore, they need a statement of purpose that aligns with the strategy. If the strategy is reactive, not proactive, it most likely won’t take into consideration the core values and core purpose of the school. Often this type of strategy is translated into several transactional tasks that teams must complete. When this happens, there is very little buy-in and middle leaders won’t be able to align individual team members with the strategy. In the end, it is just more work for staff, which may get completed, but it won’t be great.
All schools have their own statement of core purpose, or mission, and senior leaders regularly argue with me that they don’t want teams or personnel drafting their own. The reason for this is twofold: First, they fear that teams will act in self-interest and choose a purpose that does not serve the greater good. Second, their experience with drafting guiding statements are at the organizational level, which are complex and time-consuming, therefore they do not want their teams re-articulating statements that many senior leaders feel are self-explanatory.
Extraordinarily successful organizations, though, encourage developing and aligning mission statements (statements of purpose) throughout the organization: at the organization level, team level, and personal level. Obviously, at each higher level in the organization, the process is much more complex and time-consuming, but this is also why at each higher level, those mission statements need to be more enduring. A personal mission statement should be done yearly, a team’s mission statement should last two to five years, and an organizational mission statement should last ten to thirty years. We need to always be reminded of “why we do what we do.” A statement of purpose is a powerful facilitation tool to ensuring effective time management, meeting management and mitigating conflict.
How to align mission and goals across a school
For this example, I am going to use the guiding statements of a school I worked with, the American International School of Guangzhou. I find these statements compelling and crafted correctly, in that the vision identifies the core values and the mission defines the core purpose:
School Vision:
A leader of dynamic, compassionate, and connected learning.
School Mission:
To nurture future-ready individuals to aspire, achieve, and contribute.
Board Mission:
To ensure the long-term viability and be good stewards of the school’s resources, we will think individually and act collectively to focus on the big picture, manage boundaries, and monitor performance.
Leadership Mission:
To empower our colleagues to innovate, engage with our community to ensure the needs of all learners are met and to continually evaluate our programs to ensure they are preparing our students for tomorrow.
Grade-Level Mission:
To develop the dispositions and skills in grade 6 students that will support more effective agents of learning.
A much easier way to demonstrate the importance of this process is to follow this step-by-step process:
Ask staff to explain what their job is and why they do it.
Then ask them to read the organization’s mission statement.
Next, ask them to explain how their job supports that mission.
Their answer is effectively a personalized version of the organization’s mission statement, reworded to suit their context.
What they craft will feel empowering, as they will feel directly connected to the outputs and outcomes of the organization. The more familiar they are with and greater buy-in they have to the strategic objectives of the school, the more diligently they will work to ensure those objectives are achieved. They will be intrinsically motivated and feel personally invested.
The most successful schools not only help personnel understand and measure the school’s mission; they ensure teams define it in their own context and are aligned with it. This also supports why team leaders need to ensure personal interests on teams are aligned with the work that the team is doing. To achieve this, team members need to agree on the team’s core purpose, and the team leader needs to ensure it aligns with the vision, mission, and strategic objectives of the school.
The protocol I facilitate to help teams agree on their core purpose is called “Establishing Purpose.” Using this protocol for drafting statements of purpose at the core team level, with teams of four to eight people, can be developed within forty-five minutes, provided they have a common understanding of the school’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives, and have successfully completed the previous forming activities. For larger groups, especially middle leadership teams or other heterogeneous teams, it may take two meetings to complete the statement of purpose. These more disparate teams need time to reflect on how others in the group perceive the purpose of the team, define their respective role in it, identify common interests, and allow the team leader to synthesize the statements. In the second meeting, the team leader presents what he or she felt encapsulated everyone’s contribution and is aligned with the school’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives.
The importance of the team statement of purpose cannot be stressed enough
A team getting derailed three to six months into the school year is highly probable. The cause for derailment can either be the inability to mitigate conflict or member divergence in pursuing the team goal. No matter the reason for derailment, if the team does not have a shared purpose to remind them of what they are working to achieve, they will eventually retreat to their classrooms, where they can focus on and achieve personal goals. I warn against the use of broad statements, such as “We will improve student learning,” because individual interpretations of how to achieve that purpose can be vastly different. In contrast, this statement is much more vivid and defines the work of the team: “To meet the needs of all learners, we will work interdependently to observe and provide feedback in our exploration of various differentiated learning strategies.” This is not a goal, though. The goals that result from this statement should be more specific in terms of outputs, measurement, and time.
Unfortunately, school leadership has this misconception that there should only be one guiding statement for a school and that teams and individuals should only make goals. The flaw in having individual teams develop goals related to the school’s more general and higher-level guiding statement is that without an interpretation of those statements in the context that the team works, the goals that they agree on will either be vague or self-serving. Some schools take steps to elaborate on the guiding statement, which then turns into a four-page flier about what the statement means and the role each member of the community plays in achieving it. I would argue that the flier overcomplicates the purpose of a guiding statement, and furthermore makes it more difficult for all members of the community to connect with it.
