I recently watched a very helpful message by Andy Stanley on Systems. He made the very, very illuminating point that systems trump intentions and mission statements.
Here’s what that means. You might have a great mission statement, but systems are what create behaviors. So if your systems are out of sync with your mission, then your results will be off-mission too.
This will be true in spite of the best of intentions. Even if everybody in the organization wants “change,” the change will not happen if the systems are set up in a way that produces and rewards the opposite behavior.
Your systems must align with your strategy, which must align with your mission. Intentions and even mission statements are not enough. You must have people that give attention to making sure that your systems align with your principles and the results you want to produce.
Vision is essential. But it is part-one of a two-part picture. The second component is your system. Organizations — including creative, bold, and visionary organizations — need to have good systems in order to be effective. Otherwise you may just be a crazy maker.
As an aside: This is why I’m not a big fan when people say “I’m great at vision, but I ignore the details.” To me, that seems irresponsible. It’s like saying, “what I like to do is create a bunch of work for people that I don’t like to do myself.” True, leaders can’t get too deep into the details. But they will have to delve into some — and then make sure that they have and can effectively give strategic direction to the other leaders on their team that are good at systems.