Resizing The Organization 33. This book seeks to provide executives with useful insights, tools, guidelines, principles, and lessons learned about organizational transition and change. | Revitalization After Resizing 301 Translating Vision into Mission Once articulated at the very top of an organization the vision should be tested at the next level of management before it is announced to the overall workforce. As with the top team if people at this level cannot understand and support the vision rolling it out to the rest of the organization will only spell failure. At the retailer a management forum brought together the senior teams of each business unit to hear the CEO present the draft of the vision. In small groups executives generated questions about the vision and its implementation. Some discussion of semantics and other relatively minor matters ensued but the group soon endorsed the vision as something they could and would support in their units. Subsequently each team met and adapted the vision into mission statements for their business units. A mission statement is the business unit s direction and purpose for being including what distinguishes it from the competition. One specialty retailer in the conglomerate s portfolio came up with a mission of contributing to the conglomerate company s overall financial success by being recognized as the premier source of moderately priced women s sportswear. The team also prepared work plans to pave the way for moving the vision and mission statements through their organization and soliciting employee involvement and feedback. Only after plans were set for bringing it to life in the business units was the vision communicated throughout the retail conglomerate. This countered the tendency for vision statements to be rolled out amid fanfare only to fade away as people s behaviors remained consistent with the old organizational realities. The vision communication strategy addressed how to involve people in translating the vision into on-the-job behaviors along with the promotion of the vision statement itself. Translating Vision and Mission into Operating Principles The next step in living the vision is
