You Behave According To Your Mission; mission dictates culture.
By: Samuel Onyango
Tags: Mission, Strategy, Startup, Company Culture

Culture follows mission

A mission can be felt. If you are a company, your mission is felt in your products, your people, the way you treat your customers. What you write as your mission statement is just a verbalisation of what you believe your mission is or should be.

This brings us to the problematic issue of company culture.

How can you develop a “good” culture? How do you “fix” a “broken” culture? How can you avoid a toxic culture?

Let’s tell a story.

15 seafarers on a ship about to sink

There are 15 people on a ship. The storm is really bad. By now, the ship is in bad shape and almost every part of it needs constant attention — the ship can no longer afford complications; if one part fails, it will trigger a ship-wide shut-down. The captain estimates that it will take about 5 days to reach the shore — if nothing else fails.

Needless to say, these poor 15 people are on a mission to reach the shore. That is what they need to accomplish— whatever it takes. All hands on deck.

To accomplish the mission, they have to make sure that: (1) nothing fails, (2) the best person is deployed to man each part of the ship and the journey, and (3) everyone deployed remains healthy and sane enough to do their part well. The success of the mission will depend on those 3 facts.

Now, I don’t imagine those seafarers’ impulses would be: trying to sabotage each other, vying for the captainship or the chief engineer’s spot, nominating their unqualified kin to crucial roles, or joyriding.

In fact, I imagine that there would be so much tension — to save time, to get the best person for each job, to collaborate, and to support each other so that nothing fails. If people would contend for various spots, it’s because they honestly believe that someone else other than so-and-so is best for the job — not because they want glory. And there’s a chance that anyone trying to antagonise the mission might be eliminated if they can’t be convinced otherwise. Because everyone is trying to make it — and their best chance of survival is if they work together.

Why do most teams in most companies behave differently from the 15 seafarers?

They are not held together by a compelling mission that they are willing to sacrifice anything else for. So they have the luxury, and sometimes the incentive, to jeopardise (even abuse) each other, to vie for glory at the expense of everything else, award incompetent friends and kin, or simply joyride.

This problem has 3 roots.

There’s no clear mission to which everything else is subordinate; or everyone does not believe in the same mission (people have their own missions that collide with each other’s and with the company’s mission); or team members don’t trust the leader and don’t trust each other.

This is the cause of dysfunctional cultures. In a culture of higher purpose, trust, family, and merit, people don’t feel the need to sacrifice everything and everyone else for their own glory and comfort. Instead, in such a culture, people feel the need to be supportive, to go the extra mile, and accept to be subordinate to the mission that they all believe in. In such a culture, toxic behaviour is unacceptable — even punished, not rewarded; and the only way to thrive in such a culture is to be supportive, to go the extra mile, and accept to be subordinate to the mission that they all believe in.