Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey (19 page)

You may find that your mission statement will be much more balanced, much easier to work with, if you break it down into the specific role areas of your life and the goals you want to accomplish in each area. Look at your professional role. You might be a salesperson, or a manager, or a product developer. What are you about in that area? What are the values that should guide you? Think of your personal roles -- husband, wife, father, mother, neighbor, friend. What are you about in those roles?

What's important to you? Think of community roles -- the political area, public service, volunteer organizations.

One executive has used the idea of roles and goals to create the following mission statement: My mission is to live with integrity and to make a difference in the lives of others.

To fulfill this mission:

I have charity: I seek out and love the one -- each one -- regardless of his situation.

I sacrifice: I devote my time, talents, and resources to my mission.

I inspire: I teach by example that we are all children of a loving Heavenly Father and that every Goliath can be overcome.

I am impactful: What I do makes a difference in the lives of others.

These roles take priority in achieving my mission:

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Husband -- my partner is the most important person in my life. Together we contribute the fruits of harmony, industry, charity, and thrift.

Father -- I help my children experience progressively greater joy in their lives.

Son/Brother -- I am frequently "there" for support and love.

Christian -- God can count on me to keep my covenants and to serve his other children.

Neighbor -- The love of Christ is visible through my actions toward others.

Change Agent -- I am a catalyst for developing high performance in large organizations.

Scholar -- I learn important new things every day.

Writing your mission in terms of the important roles in your life gives you balance and harmony.

It keeps each role clearly before you. You can review your roles frequently to make sure that you don't get totally absorbed by one role to the exclusion of others that are equally or even more important in your life.

After you identify your various roles, then you can think about the Long Term Goals are plans you make that support the principles described in your Mission Statement. These goals should represent areas you want to focus on in the near future. Typically, Long Term Goals take longer than a week to complete, but are most specific than the lifetime goals of your Mission Statement.long-term goals you want to accomplish in each of those roles. We're into the right brain again, using imagination, creativity, conscience, and inspiration. If these goals are the extension of a mission statement based on correct principles, they will be vitally different from the goals people normally set. They will be in harmony with correct principles, with natural laws, which gives you greater power to achieve them.

They are not someone else's goals you have absorbed. They are your goals. They reflect your deepest values, your unique talent, your sense of mission. And they grow out of your chosen roles in life.

An effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do. And it can finally translate itself into daily activities so that you are proactive, you are in charge of your life, you are making happen each day the things that will enable you to fulfill your personal mission statement.

Roles and goals give structure and organized direction to your personal mission. If you don't yet have a personal mission statement, it's a good place to begin. Just identifying the various areas of your life and the two or three important results you feel you should accomplish in each area to move ahead gives you an overall perspective of your life and a sense of direction.

As we move into Habit 3, we'll go into greater depth in the area of short-term goals. The important application at this point is to identify roles and long-term goals as they relate to your personal mission statement. These roles and long-term goals will provide the foundation for effective goal setting and achieving when we get to the Habit 3 day-to-day management of life and time.

Because Habit 2 is based on principle, it has broad application. In addition to individuals, families, service groups, and organizations of all kinds become significantly more effective as they Begin with the End in Mind.

Many families are managed on the basis of crises, moods, quick fixes, and instant gratification -- not on sound principles. Symptoms surface whenever stress and pressure mount: people become cynical, critical, or silent or they start yelling and overreacting. Children who observe these kinds of behavior grow up thinking the only way to solve problems is flight or fight.

The core of any family is what is changeless, what is always going to be there -- shared vision and values. By writing a family mission statement, you give expression to its true foundation.

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This mission statement becomes its constitution, the standard, the criterion for evaluation and decision making. It gives continuity and unity to the family as well as direction. When individual values are harmonized with those of the family, members work together for common purposes that are deeply felt.

Again, the process is as important as the product. The very process of writing and refining a mission statement becomes a key way to improve the family. Working together to create a mission statement builds the PC capacity to live it.

By getting input from every family member, drafting a statement, getting feedback, revising it, and using wording from different family members, you get the family talking, communicating, on things that really matter deeply. The best mission statements are the result of family members coming together in a spirit of mutual respect, expressing their different views, and working together to create something greater than any one individual could do alone. Periodic review to expand perspective, shift emphasis or direction, amend or give new meaning to time-worn phrases can keep the family united in common values and purposes.

The mission statement becomes the framework for thinking, for governing the family. When the problems and crises come, the constitution is there to remind family members of the things that matter most and to provide direction for problem solving and decision making based on correct principles.

In our home, we put our mission statement up on a wall in the family room so that we can look at it and monitor ourselves daily. When we read the phrases about the sounds of love in our home, order, responsible independence, cooperation, helpfulness, meeting needs, developing talents, showing interest in each other's talents, and giving service to others it gives us some criteria to know how we're doing in the things that matter most to us as a family.

When we plan our family goals and activities, we say, "In light of these principles, what are the goals we're going to work on? What are our action plans to accomplish our goals and actualize these values?"

We review the statement frequently and rework goals and jobs twice a year, in September and June

-- the beginning of school and the end of school -- to reflect the situation as it is, to improve it, to strengthen it. It renews us, it recommits us to what we believe in, what we stand for.

Mission statements are also vital to successful organizations. One of the most important thrusts of my work with organizations is to assist them in developing effective mission statements. And to be effective, that statement has to come from within the bowels of the organization. Everyone should participate in a meaningful way -- not just the top strategy planners, but everyone. Once again, the involvement process is as important as the written product and is the key to its use.

I am always intrigued whenever I go to IBM and watch the training process there. Time and time again, I see the leadership of the organization come into a group and say that IBM stands for three things: the dignity of the individual, excellence, and service.

These things represent the belief system of IBM. Everything else will change, but these three things will not change. Almost like osmosis, this belief system has spread throughout the entire organization, providing a tremendous base of shared values and personal security for everyone who works there.

Once I was training a group of people for IBM in New York. It was small group, about 20 people, and one of them became ill. He called his wife in California, who expressed concern because his illness required a special treatment. The IBM people responsible for the training session arranged to have him taken to an excellent hospital with medical specialists in the disease. But they could sense that his wife was uncertain and really wanted him home where their personal physician could handle the problem.

So they decided to get him home. Concerned about the time involved in driving him to the airport
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and waiting for a commercial plane, they brought in a helicopter, flew him to the airport, and hired a special plane just to take this man to California.

I don't know what costs that involved; my guess would be many thousands of dollars. But IBM

believes in the dignity of the individual. That's what the company stands for. To those present, that experience represented its belief system and was no surprise. I was impressed.

At another time, I was scheduled to train 175 shopping center managers at a particular hotel. I was amazed at the level of service there. It wasn't a cosmetic thing. It was evident at all levels, spontaneously, without supervision.

I arrived quite late, checked in, and asked if room service were available. The man at the desk said,

"No, Mr. Covey, but if you're interested, I could go back and get a sandwich or a salad or whatever you'd like that we have in the kitchen." His attitude was one of total concern about my comfort and welfare. "Would you like to see your convention room?" he continued. "Do you have everything you need? What can I do for you? I'm here to serve you."

There was no supervisor there checking up. This man was sincere.

The next day I was in the middle of a presentation when I discovered that I didn't have all the colored markers I needed. So I went out into the hall during the brief break and found a bellboy running to another convention. "I've got a problem," I said. "I'm here training a group of managers and I only have a short break. I need some more colored pens.

He whipped around and almost came to attention. He glanced at my name tag and said, "Mr.

Covey, I will solve your problem."

He didn't say, "I don't know where to go" or "well, go and check the front desk." He just took care of it. And he made me feel like it was his privilege to do so.

Later, I was in the side lobby, looking at some of the art objects. Someone from the hotel came up to me and said, "Mr. Covey, would you like to see a book that describes the art objects in this hotel?"

How anticipatory! How service-oriented!

I next observed one of the employees high up on a ladder cleaning windows in the lobby. From his vantage point he saw a woman having a little difficulty in the garden with a walker. She hadn't really fallen, and she was with other people. But he climbed down that ladder, went outside, helped the woman into the lobby and saw that she was properly taken care of. Then he went back and finished cleaning the windows.

I wanted to find out how this organization had created a culture where people bought so deeply into the value of customer service. I interviewed housekeepers, waitresses, bellboys in that hotel and found that this attitude had impregnated the minds, hearts, and attitudes of every employee there.

I went through the back door into the kitchen, where I saw the central value: "Uncompromising personalized service." I finally went to the manager and said, "My business is helping organizations develop a powerful team character, a team culture. I am amazed at what you have here."

"Do you want to know the real key?" he inquired. He pulled out the mission statement for the hotel chain.

After reading it, I acknowledged, "That's an impressive statement. But I know many companies that have impressive mission statements."

"Do you want to see the one for this hotel?" he asked.

"Do you mean you developed one just for this hotel?"

"Yes."

"Different from the one for the hotel chain?"

"Yes. It's in harmony with that statement, but this one pertains to our situation, our environment, our time." He handed me another paper.

"Who developed this mission statement?" I asked.

"Everybody," he replied.

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"Everybody? Really, everybody?"

"Yes."

"Housekeepers?"

"Yes."

"Waitresses?"

"Yes."

"Desk clerks?"

"Yes. Do you want to see the mission statement written by the people who greeted you last night?"

He pulled out a mission statement that they, themselves, had written that was interwoven with all the other mission statements. Everyone, at every level, was involved.