Create clarity of purpose

Description

Leaders ensure that there is excellent clarity of purpose throughout the organisation. With this term, we refer to the full spectrum of longer-term strategic objectives through to shorter-term goals, with the level of detail increasing for shorter-term goals.

In order to Maximise engagement, this clarity should ideally be created and communicated through a collaborative process informed by a combination of detailed and broader perspectives rather than a traditional top-down cascade from senior leadership.

Rationale

Clarity of purpose is at the heart of an organisation's capability to work in a distributed, empowered and autonomous fashion whilst retaining excellent alignment.

In addition, Clarity of Purpose:

• Is an essential ingredient in enabling directed, value-building collaboration within and across teams.
• Provides compelling direction and meaningful work that are essential motivational factors.
• Reduces dysfunction by aligning parts of the organisation so that they work together rather than against each other.
• Reduces waste through aligning teams' work around value generation.
• Improves the context and quality of decisions that support valuable objectives.
• Provides a direction to optimise products and services, environment and system of work.
• Provides a baseline for assessing progress and identifying required adaptive actions.

Using a collaborative process to engage stakeholders with both broad and deep perspectives in a cadence of strategy and objectives refresh has a number of benefits (Hoshin Planning Process). It enables better informed and targeted objectives to be constructed and gains much-improved buy-in and understanding from participants who, in turn, communicate direction more effectively.

Related Principles

• Support autonomy with clear boundaries
• Self-managed teams
• Organise around value streams
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Shared context improves decisions
• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Foster a high trust environment
• Maximise engagement
• Cultivate learning between teams

References

Humble, Jez; Molesky, Joanne; O'Reilly, Barry. Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly))

IBL

Leading Teams by Richard Hackman

Self Determination Theory

The Art of Action