SETTING THE STAGE FOR LEARNING

 

From the desk of Cindy Thatcher...

Businesses around the globe try to describe their corporate strategy using mission and vision statements. Well-crafted statements provide employees, investors, customers, and other stakeholders with information about what the company is, where it is going, and how it’s going to get there.

Learning and development organizations (L&D) also need a clear statement of what, where and how L&D is going to contribute to the strategic goals of the company. Many learning organizations have yet to make the move towards devising and communicating a mission and vision, preferring to go about the business of creating courseware and training programs without taking the time for this critical step.

Vision

Thompson, Strickland and Gamble (2008) define strategic vision as a statement used to describe the direction an organization is headed and what its future focus will be. Many organizations use short statements that resemble slogans to help its customers and employees easily remember what the future holds. Microsoft’s “There will be a personal computer on every desk running Microsoft software” and Caterpillar’s “Be the global leader in customer value” both demonstrate this concept. Along these same lines, the Caterpillar learning organization uses the short phrase “What have I learned today?” as part of every presentation internally and externally. It conveys the company’s overall goal of becoming a learning organization and reinforces the actual vision and mission of Caterpillar University:

Enterprise Learning Vision: To be recognized as one of the best continual learning organizations in the world.

University Mission: Improve the performance of Caterpillar employees, dealers, suppliers and customers.

A clear vision helps learning professionals understand exactly what’s most important, and how what they are doing matters to the overall business strategy. Without a unifying vision, learning professionals will have to spend time getting help from supervisors to make decisions or worse – second-guess their own decisions because of a lack of guidelines.

Mission

Mission statements should provide specific information about the company’s present situation. These statements help employees understand who the company’s customer is, what services they offer, what the customers’ needs are, and how the company will satisfy its customers. Companies who do a good job of defining their mission have employees who are (1) unified and (2) understand their role in the organization, both of which lead to an increase in employee engagement. Some examples of strong mission statements include:

Pfizer Pharmaceutical: "We dedicate ourselves to humanity's quest for longer, healthier, happier lives through innovation in pharmaceutical, consumer and animal health products"

Dell Computers: "With the power of direct and Dell's team of talented people, we are able to provide customers with superb value; high-quality, relevant technology; customized systems; superior service and support; and products and services that are easy to buy and use". 

Best practice learning organizations take statements like these and turn them into their own mission and vision statements. For example, the mission of the Boeing Leadership Center is explicitly linked to The Boeing Company Vision 2016.  This enterprise-wide vision states: “People Working Together as a Global Enterprise for Aerospace Leadership.” The Leadership Center’s mission is “to work in partnership with the business units to provide leadership development and learning experiences that help Boeing achieve its business objectives.” The Leadership Center’s vision is “to be recognized for developing leaders who shape the world.”

Missions and Visions of Established Learning Leaders

The Caterpillar and Boeing examples above show the mission and vision statements of best-practice, award-winning learning organizations. Here are some other examples.  

Defense Acquisition University emphasizes the organization it serves and who the ultimate beneficiary of their efforts will be.

Vision: A premier corporate university serving DoD Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.

Mission: Provide practitioner training and services to enable the Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics community to make smart business decisions and delivery timely and affordable capabilities to the war-fighter.

Toyota emphasizes the audience as well, and further illuminates the mission through its core principles.

Mission: To continuously improve the performance of our associates, dealers, and partners through lifelong learning.

Core Principles:

• Addresses Actionable Business Needs
• Supports Lifetime Career Growth
• Is Accessible Anytime/Anywhere
• Creates and Promotes a Community of Learners
• Involves Leaders as Faculty

This Global Food Company created its vision as part of the establishment of a new corporate university. Longer than most, it was designed to explain the new learning organization to a range of internal stakeholders.

Vision: The Corporate University is a strategic commitment to the long-term success of the company through the development of its associates. It will achieve this by reinforcing the principles of the company, teaching how we operate and by building functional capabilities, management and leadership skills.

• Our centre for all learning
• Taking the best learning and making it available to all associates, globally
• It’s more than courses - documents, library, webzone, learning communities, e-learning
• The first place you should go to develop yourself, your team, and to improve business performance

These learning organizations have enabled their companies to move closer to their goals through improved employee and business performance. The mission and vision statement is only one aspect of alignment, but it is a significant factor in enabling learning organizations to be a part of the companies’ success.

Creating Mission and Vision Statements

The mission and vision of the learning organization is worthless if it doesn’t reflect the strategy of the business and the role that the CEO and other business leaders expect L&D to play in achieving that strategy. The company’s CLO or learning leader needs to discuss business strategy to make sure the L&D organization is aligned, and the learning organization further needs to know its role. Since business strategy and corporate mission and vision statements change over time, this is not a one-time conversation.

The learning function was always "at the table' as a strategic player at HSBC, but Regina Nowlan, Group Director for Learning Development and Communications, notes that they may not have always said the right things. They were playing a strategic role by identifying the business needs, but it required a step back to look at the larger vision to determine if funds and resources could be spent better in other areas. A new set of tools helped to achieve this improved clarity of vision and the conversations surrounding these new tools have become strategic.

Regina Nowlan, HSBC

Once the strategy and roles are established, the senior learning staff needs to decide how to, first, best deliver the results that the business leaders expect, and, second, how to describe that in a few simple, actionable statements that can guide actions of learning professionals, and make sure that employees and their managers know “what’s in it for them” when they work with L&D.

Once the department decides on a vision and mission, communicate, communicate, communicate! It is critical that the mission and vision be front and center in communications with learning staff and with the “customer” for the learning. The learning portal should feature the mission and vision prominently, and it should guide the discussion when decisions are made about the direction L&D needs to go. 

Once communicated, employees can start supporting and making decisions for the L&D group using these statements. The statements should be reviewed any time the business strategy changes, or according to a set schedule to ensure that the statements still align with the business strategy and provide an accurate description of where the unit is going. Keep in mind that a change in the company’s strategic direction will have a definite impact on the learning organization, and the vision and mission should be adjusted accordingly.

When done right, the mission and vision statements deliver a clear, unequivocal view of what’s important in learning and why, and can lead the way to improved performance for the company and support from business leaders and employees. The final example comes from an award-winning global foods company recognized for its alignment and furthering of corporate goals. They “imagine” their vision, and use the mission statement as the blueprint for how to “do it”. While the vision seems a bit generic, the mission statement makes the how, what and why clear.

Vision: Establish the corporate university as the most respected accredited corporate university on the face of the earth, serving the needs of the company and its employees as well as external customers and our communities.

Mission: To accelerate business performance and organizational innovation through thought leadership to enable The Company to become the biggest, the best, and the strongest provider of frozen food solutions on the face of the earth.

So while your organization has an overall vision and mission statement, be sure that your L&D organization doesn’t fall into the trap of creating courseware and training programs without taking the time to develop a mission and vision statement of their own. Doing so will not only allow the L&D employees to understand where the learning organization is today and where it is going in the future, but will also allow the rest of the organization to understand where learning is going and how it will help the organization achieve its strategic goals.

Cindy Thatcher, CorpU Research Analyst