Alignment of a company's vision and values with its strategies, policies and management controls is the foundation of high performance. Organizations
by Wallace Weeks

Alignment of a company's vision and values with its strategies,
policies and management controls is the foundation of high
performance. Organizations without this alignment will create
friction between management's desires and the actions of employees
and, there-by, inefficiency.

Think of vision as the statement of what you aspire for your
company to be, and values as the yardstick for its behavior. Now
think of strategies, policies and management controls as causing
the daily decisions and actions of your employees. Based on these
definitions, you can see what might happen to your company when
there is not alignment versus when there is.

Let's look at a mobility company that had been in business for
more than two decades, but whose vision and values were not
aligned.

The company's vision was to find solutions to mobility issues
for people in its market. Its values statement focused on teamwork,
sympathy, understanding and respect in employee relationships. The
company was accredited, and the accreditation had been renewed
once.

But sales had declined for three consecutive years by a total of
25 percent. In the meantime, the market had grown 18 percent, so
there had also been significant loss of market share. The income
statement reported losses in three of the five previous years. The
owners were loaning money to the company and not taking
salaries.

Management also pointed out that: different people processed
orders in different ways; customer opinion was that the company did
not deliver what it promised; service techs were wasteful with
tools and parts; and the company had just disposed of two 45-foot
trailer-loads of stale inventory. Financial analysis showed the
company still had about nine months' inventory.

These results could have been blamed on bad marketing, employee
turnover, insufficient management information, excessive overhead,
jealousy over who gets paid what and what they contribute, and
increased competition. Each condition would have been correct.

But the root cause of this company's distress was lack of
alignment on two levels. First, the company's vision and values
were not pointed in the same direction. The vision was
customer-focused, and the values were focused on employee
relations. How could they deliver solutions to mobility issues when
they most valued good employee relations? Both the company's vision
and its values should have been customer-focused.

The second level of failed alignment was among strategies,
policies and management controls. Strategies must support vision
and values, while policies should support strategies, and
management controls should support policies. In this mobility
company's case, there were no strategies. Management and employees
showed up for work and reacted to the issues of the day.

The company did have policies, but they were designed to support
an accrediting body, not to support strategies.

Finally, management had no controls to let them know whether
their policies were being followed or if they were failing
customers. This manifested itself in the company's sales decline,
unprofitable operation and customer opinions.

The long-term fix for this company came not by improving its bad
conditions but by creating alignment of its vision, values,
strategies, policies and management controls.

Alignment started with involving all employees in the rethinking
of vision and values. Strategies were developed to uncover more
opportunities to find solutions for customers. Policies and
procedures were modified to support the new strategies. Management
controls like budgets, timeliness of service reports, accounting
software and communication systems were added to alert management
of failures to support the vision and values.

The results were immediate, and after three years, the company
had more than doubled its sales without geographic or product line
expansion. Cash flow permitted the owners to be repaid for their
loans to the company, which had been profitable in each of the
three years. Customer satisfaction also had turned around, with 99
percent of the company's surveys being excellent.

Wallace Weeks is founder and president of Weeks Group Inc., a
Melbourne, Fla.-based strategy consulting firm. He can be reached
at 321/752-4514 or by e-mail at wweeks@weeksgroup.com.