441 | 3 Ways To Avoid Mission Drift – Part 1

Chris LoCurto 0:00
How mission drift can be distracting from your purpose and holding you back from real success, that is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show, where we discuss leadership and life, and discover that business is what you do, not who you are. Hey, folks, welcome to the show. We've been talking lately about purpose, direction, clarity, over the past month. And this episode marks the beginning of a new theme on personal responsibility. So we are talking about mission drift. But before I get into all of that, what I would like to do is kind of give our explanation of mission/vision strategy, and the reason why I feel like this is super important, and we do this all the time on the business side of stuff that we do here is to help people to understand, or at least to have a common vocabulary that we have here, as we're teaching through stuff. Why is that important? Because people teach all different types of definitions, or all different kinds of definitions for each one of those mission, vision, and strategy. I've even literally heard somebody telling me, that vision was one thing and mission was the other, and it's the exact opposite of what we teach. And that you can't have a mission until you have a vision. And so we're going to kind of lay it out in a way of saying, okay, go with what you want, but for the purposes of what we are teaching, and for the purposes of what we do here at The Poimen group, this is what we believe. So when we say mission, for me, mission is your purpose, your purpose for existence. So whether or not it is you as an individual, it is your marriage, it is your family, it's your business, it's your career, it's whatever, there needs to be a purpose for its existence. That for us is what we would call mission. The mission is the purpose for the business to exist, right? So for us, our mission statement here is; worshiping God, and loving people, and guiding individuals and organizations to greater perspective. Now, let me kind of break that down a little bit. For us, everything that we teach here is my intellectual property and it's all biblically based. So for us, worshiping God is a very important thing you've heard me say multiple times on the show that profit for our business. Now I will teach you, we will teach you how to make as much money as you want to make in your business, but profits, not our number one motivating factor. We do not show up to make money, we show up to worship God, we show up second part of this, to help people change their lives, giving them great perspective that helps them change their lives. The third motivating factor is well, we're going to have a profitable business, everybody wants to put food on their table, we're not going to run a business, that's not profitable, that would be really silly. So when you look at our purpose, and for those of you that have been to our offices, that have been through our events, I think you would agree with this, hopefully, as you listen to the show, I hope that you would agree that that purpose for existence as far as our business is what we do. That is why we exist we exist, A, to worship God, B, to love on people, and help guide them and organizations to a greater perspective. That's why we're here. So you should have a mission for why your business exists for why your career exists. For if you're married for while you're, you know, what's the mission, what is the purpose of your marriage, if you have kids, you know, what is the purpose of your family, all of these things help you to understand purpose. Now, vision is different. A lot of people put mission and vision together, which they should be. But a lot of people don't understand vision, they think it's just, you know, a plan of something. And it's actually not for us, well, at least the way that we define it. For us vision is a destination. Now what I teach all the time here is is everybody's been to either the beach, or they've been to the mountains or they've gone on some vacation somewhere. So if you think of a vacation that you've taken, so let's just take the beach, for example. If you have been to the beach, then you know what it looks like. You know that if you're going to take it vacation to the beach. Again, you know what it looks like, you know what you're going to do when you get there, you know what you're gonna do on the beach, if you're going to sit under an umbrella, throw a football, frisbee go in the water, whatever you're going to do. You know which restaurants you're going to hit, you know what you're probably going to eat. If you've been there plenty of times before. You know what that destination looks like. And you know what the experience at that destination looks like. That is vision. It's a destination. You should have one mission, one purpose. Now you can have a mission in each area of your life, right? But you should have one purpose for existence. But you can have 700 different visions. We are constantly moving from destination to destination to destination. As we accomplish something, we've already been resetting the next destination. We're looking into the future, here's where we're going. We're constantly communicating it, we're talking about it all the time in our staff meetings. Here's where we're headed. Here's what we're doing. Even with new things that we're adding, we'll be updating, hey, here's what's happening with the new plans, the new vision. Now, keep in mind, vision is that destination, it should always be changing out because you should actually be hitting it. Now I am a big fan of Jim Collins and I love the book Good to Great. And I will tell you there is something that we used to talk a lot about, which is a b-hag a big, hairy, audacious goal, which is something that is a 10 year industry changing type of goal. Now, I'm pretty darn positive, that everybody who's listening to this show you are in an industry that's changing a heck of a lot faster nowadays, than back when that was written. I'm not saying you can't have a B-hag, I think it's great for you to have a B-hag, I think you should put a B-hag in place. But here's the thing that I want you to focus on, is that if you aren't going to change the industry in the next 10 years, and you're not big enough to make something like that happen, some big, hairy, audacious goal, then you've got to be looking at what happens in the next three years. What happens in the next five years. Why am I saying that? Because you need to have an understanding that things are going to change a heck of a lot faster now because business moves at such a fast pace. You do not hear me saying anything negative against the b-hag. I'm not saying anything negative, I'm saying you shouldn't have that. What I'm saying is a lot of folks who are small businesses, or even medium sized businesses, put in a 10 year goal. And that is the thing that they're pointing to. And unfortunately, that's their vision. 10 years from now, folks, that's not the only vision you should be having. And if you're focusing only on a 10 year goal, then man, it's gonna get really boring. Why? Because you're a small business, you're not a big, huge industry, you're not a big huge business that is still moving and making things happen. You're a small business that life is changing, business is changing radically. So you need to set destinations that you can get after have some wins, make bigger destinations, go after bigger things. Hopefully all of that is making sense, you should not hear anything negative about setting a 10 year goal. Except if it's your only goal. If that's your only vision as a smaller medium sized business, then I think you're stretching yourself too far out, you need some better wins. Last thing I want to talk about on these definitions is strategy. So for us strategy, or as I jokingly say many times around here "strategery".

For those of you that are old enough to know what that comes from-strategy is the way that we're going to get to that destination. Now there is all kinds of definition for strategy. Right? But I'm telling you what we use this is our way of saying it. Mission is our purpose. Vision is the destination, the destination must be based on the purpose. If you have a vision that is not based on the purpose or trying to help you accomplish the purpose. That's a ridiculous vision. Right? Because it's going against your purpose for existing. Strategy is how we get to that vision, now people say, "I thought that was goals." Goals are in there as well. Goals are part of that. initiatives is usually the word that we will use around here. We will do many initiatives in getting to that vision. So a lot of this we talk about in our stratplan. We love helping leaders to create and stick to a strategic plan for their business. So when we come back, we're going to talk about how we help leaders to accomplish a bunch of that.

Hey, folks, a couple years ago, I was visiting with a client. And the CEO said to me, Chris, we're not going to hit our goal. I asked him what he meant. And he said, We're gonna miss our three year revenue goal coming out of strat plan by a few months, I didn't realize it at first, that he was having a little fun with me by saying they were about to triple their company in less than three years. How freaking awesome is that? Folks, these are the kinds of results that businesses get by coming through our four day strat plan event. On average, we find $2.1 million worth of revenue in the next 12 months that the company was not planning on. And this event is for all sized businesses. If you're small, medium, or large, it works for every single business, because it's not industry specific. It's about gaining all the information about all the things inside of your business that are holding you back from success, and then giving you a plan and a process on how to walk that out and be successful in your business. By discovering the things that are holding you back. It helps you get to all of those goals that you've been planning on for a long time. So if you're ready to get the perspective, you need to solve what's holding you and your business back. So you can grow faster than you need strap land. To learn more, go to Chris accardo.com/stratplan. That's Chris locurto.com/straplineokaysoweare. We're talking Mission Drift today. And right now we're heavy into the definitions of things that are important to understand for your business, not just your business, but your life as well. What is mission? What is vision? What is strategy now, for us? We love helping leaders to create and then stick to a strategic plan for their business hashtag strap line. You've heard of strapline before, I'm sure you have. This is our process of helping businesses. So we have, we have a whole ton of stuff for leaders individually. But then we also have this program where we bring in a full leadership team, or at least the the leaders that are part of the decision making process. And then we go through the business for four days and help them to discover all the things that are holding them back from their purpose. Yes, there's probably a ton of things in your business that's keeping you from going after your purpose. That's not aligned with your purpose. And one of the other things is helping them to discover that their vision is probably not being accomplished the way that they want, because there's all these things, holding them back. And then we set new vision, the average company coming through, the plan that we put in place is six to 12 months. It's a lot it's it's big because it is business changing the average increase in revenues above water companies already planning, on average is $2.1 million.

So if a company is already planning on increasing their revenues, X amount, when we go through and discover these things, we help them to find considerably more, on average, it's 2.1 million. It helps to create a more unified and productive team. Why is that important? Because believe it or not many, many businesses are operating on a shotgun approach. The destination isn't a destination, it's 17 destinations, and their resources which are precious, yes, you can still have a phenomenal bottom line, and yet be blowing through resources in a very bad way. Because you're fighting against yourself. Right, you're going in multiple directions. Our goal is to help you create a unified and productive team that is going after the same direction everybody should be going after the same vision. Right? Even though you're doing different parts in different areas of the company. If we're not all working towards a common goal, then unfortunately, we're utilizing our resources to go in different directions. It also helps people to operate a plan to grow the business that actually works. Why? Because most people believe that just adding money is going to be the solution to their problems. And folks, I will tell you and I asked people coming in all the time. If we were to double our revenues tomorrow, let's say we were to add twice the amount of business tomorrow that we have today. What would happen now this is somewhat of a trick question, because there's really only two answers right? The answer that most people come up with when they actually stop and think about it is oh my gosh, we would self implode. We could not handle that. That's right. That's the point. The goal is to discover all the things that are keeping us from twice the amount of revenues. Why is it important to point that out? Because people think if we just added more revenue, things would be better? No, it would not. What it would do is it would put way more pressure on the problems that already exist on the things that are lacking already. The other answer to the question, and once in a great while somebody will not think through it and go, Oh, we can totally handle that. Great. Now let's stop and think about that. If you could handle twice the amount of revenue, what does that say about your business? If you spend 30 seconds on it, you can go Oh, yeah, that means that we are wasting a whole lot of money on resources that aren't being utilized. So either way, it really helps you to see that we either need to fix a bunch of stuff. Or we are spending way too much on stuff that's not being utilized. Well, either way we fix it. We rock on, we have a great plan. So I personally know and I know a lot of you do. I know what it's like to wonder if you can lead a team to success and grow business without feeling like you're climbing a new mountain every single day. But folks, it's more than just creating a great business plan. It's about sticking to the plan. As you move forward. If you have a great plan, and you stick to that plan, then you can accomplish considerably more than you're accomplishing right now. But here's what we know. Life can get pretty darn messy. All kinds of things can happen. We call it torpedoing your day, if something comes in and torpedoes your day. Then many times it can adjust your plan. And something needs to happen. Right, it's easy to get off track and drift from the original plan and purpose. One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is they're plugging away at the right plans, something happens and they go back to what's comfortable. I know you've never done that.

I know I've never done that before in my life. Right? Why is that such a problem. Comfort many times is the reason we are stuck in the spot and in the position that we're in comfort many times is the reason why we have things holding us back. And sometimes we put something uncomfortable in place like a great mission vision strategy, Strategic Plan strat plan. And then as we're moving along, something uncomfortable happens. And instead of sticking to it, making an adjustment, do what we need to do make a quick adjustment and then get back into it. Then what happens is, we go backwards and we go to we go more towards comfort. And we end up not going in the same direction we're in. So think about this. Experts in air navigation have a rule of thumb. So think about it if you are in, you know, air navigation, right, you're flying applying a rule of thumb that is known as the one in 60 rule. So the 160 rule states that for every one degree, a plane veers off its course, it misses its target, by one mile for every 60 miles. That means in every 60 miles, which is not a long distance for a plane, one degree means that it's off by one mile. In other words, the farther you travel, the farther you're going to miss your destination. Think about that, folks. Think about that. Right? What is our destination? It's the next thing that we're heading toward that is fulfilling our mission.

We see this one in 60 effect and businesses all the time. All the time. Think about it. What happens if your team gets restructured? I don't know. I don't know about y'all but one COVID hit. We took a teeth kicking because we weren't able to do our our public live event next level leadership live events that spring. We had to we were able to do it. We had just had to do it simulcast and we were so glad to hear all of you guys going we don't like that we like being there in person right? We were thinking man this is going to change our industry. Praise God it did not. However, what we did do very quickly, because it did affect things inside of our business. It affected sales that it you know, for us a lot of what we do is helping people one on one, helping businesses, you know, doing events like that. So that affected us on in the short term right? In the long term, it did not everything God blessed us, we came back to where we were. However, immediately what we did is we took a hard look at our team and said, What do we need to restructure? Right, so I talked with the team, and I said, some of you are working in one area, and we're actually gonna have to move you over to help out another areas, so that I can keep paying you. So if I want to keep you on payroll, you know, I need you to continue to work. Right now, obviously, we didn't work as we weren't working full 40 hour weeks back in those days, but I'm going to keep paying you we're not going to change anything. But I need you to multitask, I'm going to need some of you that are an admin working in marketing. And I know that's probably the last place you want to work. You know, some of you that are working live events, you're going to have to work and, you know, maybe sales or something else, right? So we had to make some restructuring choices, some changes, to help people continue to work to help us continue to keep the doors open, right. And fabulously what we discovered is, some people worked better in other areas, which was great, but it still was something that took us off our projected destination, right? It changed things up for us. So it was something that affected us. Another thing that can happen is you you encounter unexpected problems, you know, everything is going well. And then all of a sudden, something bad happens, maybe you you lose a really solid team member or maybe you lose a leader or you know, something happens with a big client, whatever, you you encounter this unexpected problem. And it affects the journey that you're on, it affects the destination, it pulls you off one degree, two degrees, four degrees, whatever, from going towards your destination, right? And so you've got to stop and handle that thing. Or maybe your processes get jacked up. There's not a company that comes through strat plan, that we don't discover processes that either don't exist, or are not operating well, because they've not been set up to operate well, right. So something jacks up your processes that can pull you off track or you go back to comfortable patterns. Whoa, that's a frustrating one for me, for the guy who teaches people to advance, the guy who teaches people to grow. One of the struggles that I have, is when people choose comfort, over discomfort when the discomfort is actually working, you know, when it's helping them when it's helping them get to a better place when it's stretching them. Right? Sometimes that discomfort is something that they don't want. And so they go back to comfortable patterns. And then here's their response. Oh, yeah, we've tried all that stuff. Oh, yeah, we tried that it didn't work out. Now I hear you say you try it.

Did you get to completion on it, that's there's a world of difference. And we completed that, and it didn't work out. And we tried it and it didn't work out. When you go back to comfort folks. It affects your destination. Let me say it again, if you are operating in something that is stretching you it's tough, it's difficult. It's pointing you to a new destination, a new direction. And it's uncomfortable, but it's working. And you back out of it to go back to what's comfortable, then I can promise you making bigger changes in the future are going to be a lot further off. Why? Because what happens is, is you're going to spend time convincing yourself, that thing didn't work. And instead of continuing to jump in and find ways to help you, what tends to happen is people push off going after things that will help them because they feel like failures. So just think about that if you're if you're slipping back into your comfortable ways. When you had a plan pointing in the right direction, well, it's gonna affect you. Another thing that can happen is your purpose gets eclipsed by the urgent oh my gosh, this one is so tough. This one is so painful because many times people have a great purpose in place. But there are 14,000 different urgent things that keep popping up that cause them to pull away from their purpose right Oh we should do what I say it's all the the good ideas right? Oh, we should do that thing. That's a that's a good idea. We should totally do that. Here's another good idea. We should jump on that we should make that happen. Oh my gosh. This thing is going to be a phenomenal colossal moneymaker. We should jump on that in my 30 plus years in business, I can't count on two hands the number of times we made mistakes by going after good ideas. And by that what I mean is, when we went after the good ideas, we took resources away, we took focus away, we created a new direction that shouldn't have been put in in the first place. We did all kinds of things that had we looked at the good idea and asked many questions, but one, you know, a couple of really important ones, does it align with our mission? does it align with our purpose? Not? Can we crowbar it into our purpose? does it align with what we're called to do? If the answer is no, then strongly we should be saying no to this idea. After you ask that question, a super important question is, and gosh, a lot of you entrepreneurs, I really hope you're listening to me right now. A lot of you leaders that want to just run after the next new thing, I hope you're listening to me right now. Shoot family members, he parents who are leading your family who keep getting distracted, I hope you're listening to me right now. If the thing that we're thinking is a good idea is going to pull us away from the things that are working, pull us away, I'm not saying fit nicely into add beautifully to pull us away from the things that are working, then we can not be surprised when we are one degree or 20 degrees off of our destination. Anything that's going to pull you away. Now one of the things we'll tell businesses here is don't do anything that pulls you away from the original moneymaker. If you have something that's making you money, and it's continued, we're not we're not talking about something, you know, your cheese got moved, and all of a sudden, the thing that makes you money isn't making you money. That's not we're talking about, we're talking about when leaders, entrepreneurs, get bored, we need to do this. Here's a good idea. We want more money, we want more whatever, right? That's a distraction, we should go do this. Whenever you do that, and you pull resources, money, people time,

whatever it is, excitement, enthusiasm, from the team, away from the thing making you money, then I guarantee you what's going to happen is you're going to end up at a different destination than you wanted to. And what tends to happen when people do that is they look back and see how much they negatively impacted their current processes, their current vision, their current mission, and they regret it immediately. Now, some people it takes them a while. But once they see it, once they recognize, then they know that was a bad idea. So by the time you realize what's happened in any of those situations that I just explained, by the time you realize what's happening, you're already miles off course. So when we come back, we're going to talk about the first way to avoid mission drift.

Joel Fortner 28:21
Hey, it's Joel Fortner. Here, I'm the vice president of leadership development on Chris's team and I oversee our Next Level Mastermind business coaching program. Most business owners and leaders lack a clear path to succeed in business, that question whether they're making the right decisions, if they're focusing on the right things to really grow their business. If this is you, you need a coach in your life. coaches help you make better decisions, navigate uncertainty lead more effectively, and grow your business without sacrificing your life in your family. In their first year, our clients typically see an average of 67% increase in gross revenue and an average of 138% increase in net profit and regained hours of time. Our clients stay in the program for three and a half years simply because of the results they get. So if you're ready to run your business at the next level and see the growth you've been wanting, then visit Chris accardo.com/mastermindtodayokaysoihavesomequestionsforyouhaveyoueverexperiencedtunnelvisionyouknowwhat

Chris LoCurto 29:21
I'm talking about where all you can see is the myopic view in front of you, right? Whatever it is, you're not paying attention to the things around you. You're not paying attention to what's happening. You're just focused on this small section that you can see or have you ever just focused on the very next task in front of you. I've had those moments of what's the next thing I just want to knock it out and get it done right. Or have you ever had The leadership Crazy Cycle hit you. And you just ignore your principles, right? You have so much to get done that instead of focusing on the the principles that got you to where you are, you just focus on how do I get through the day? How I've got 14,000 Things I've got to do today? How do I get through them? Right? How do I make them happen? Just just got to go, just gotta go. Or you operate at the mercy of the tyranny of the urgent, we talked a little bit about that before the first break. How many times has the urgent thing controlled your day? Right? Whenever you look at the what we like to think of as the tyranny of the urgent, why is it tyranny? Because rarely is the urgent, the important stuff to steal from Stephen Covey. Right? There's always urgent stuff that seems like it's really important to get to. And yet we discover it's actually not important stuff. It's just urgent. It's like those emails, like when you have those, that the notifications that pop up and tell you another email came in another email came in another, I have not had that thing for years. You know, on my computer screen, upper right hand corner, while I use MAC's, I'm assuming it's still the same old PCs, I don't know. You know, it says you have a new email, folks, I have not had that notification turned on for somewhere close to two decades. Because of a great book by a guy named Todd Duncan, who doesn't live too terribly far from here, which is called time traps, that is not a big read. It's a great read, though of distractions, the books a couple decades old, and it's fantastic. It was one of the things I helped my team to get a bunch of these distractions out of their way. Because those urgent things will pull your attention. Guess what? Many times it doesn't just pull your attention, it pulls the rest of your resources as well. So instead of getting stuck in the tyranny of the urgent, we like to actually focus on what's really important. Another thing that can capture our attention is the focus on what we're doing, rather than why we're doing it. If we don't focus on why are we doing this thing? I have had companies that have come through that have had team members in place for years, that when we looked at the role, the question is why is that role exist? While we put that role in place? 10 years ago? That's not the question. I'm asking you. Why does that role exist today? What is it helping? Oh, my gosh, we've not even thought about that. We've just continued to do it over and over and over and over again. Sometimes we can get too focused on what we're doing, instead of why we're doing it. So here's the deal. It happens all the time. But leaders, please listen to me. Listen, listen, listen, you don't have that luxury. I'm sorry. You don't have that luxury, eventually, your decisions start to drift away from the direction that you had set.

Right? If we allow any of the things I've been talking about, and I know, we've all experienced Listen, the guy who's teaching this has experienced it, the reason why I'm teaching it is because it's something that God has helped me to see and change and make adjustments to and it's something that we still have to catch yourself, from time to time asking the questions, you know, is this right? Does this align? Should we be doing this? How much resources is this going to take? Alright, we have a saying around here. If it's not excellent, we don't want to do it. Right, it doesn't mean that every single thing we do has to be excellent. But before we go to add something new, that's going to require resources that we have in place that are utilized to do pull off other excellent things. If we can't do that new thing with excellence, then we're we're gonna really, really question Why should we even think about it. So the first way to avoid mission drift, and this is, this is the I have three different things. This is gonna be a two parter as well, because this is as far as I'm gonna get today. The first way to avoid mission drift, all begins with decision making. So we decide our way into drift. And we can decide our way out of it. Now, the Harvard Business Review says that corporate success depends on how well we make 1000s of small, underline, circle highlight small decisions. So many times we think that success comes from our big decisions, you know, these big ideas, these big destinations that we go after these big products and services, the next great big, you know, big idea and yet it's Actually the 1000s of small decisions that we make on a daily basis that help us to get to success. Now, as I say that to you, you're probably going, yep, that's actually true. If you're not, then I want you to spend some time thinking about how many decisions you make in a day that are pointing towards the destination you're heading to whether you've chosen it or not. How many times do we end up at a destination, and we didn't choose to get there in our minds. But the decisions that we made daily got us there. Once again, one of the things that we help people to discover in our processes is what's holding you back. The decisions that you made, have created these opportunities to fix the things that a lot of those decisions have put in place, like running ahead of ourselves before having phenomenal training, or running ahead of ourselves before having phenomenal processes, or the number two things that every single business struggles from not making an emphasis on having high levels of quality communication, and not putting in quality accountability. All right. So every day we're making decisions. Take for example, let's just pull something out of like, accountability. Chris, I know I hear you talk all the time about doing those carries. I get it I know it's important. I know something we should do. But man, I just don't have the time to do it. Okay. So here's Let me translate that into results speak. Chris, I'm not going to take the time to work on something important. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. And hope that it turns out those the same exact way that it would be had I stopped and put those carriers in place. Now think about this. Why are carrying so important. This isn't just a tool to put in place for no reason. There's nothing that we teach here that we emphasize, you should go you should make this happen. That doesn't have a profound effect on your business. So what is it? What is a care Ray? It is helping you to get the results that you expect out of every single team member? What is the results that you expect? This is what we want you to go accomplish? What do people normally do 99.9% of the time, even folks that we've been teaching Karis to a long time, still can mess this up. They teach people a job description. They teach people the things to do the tasks to do. And then they get super frustrated that the people have not ended up at the results that's expected of them. So then you have a leader going to a team member saying, You're not doing this. And the team member says I'm doing exactly what you asked me to do. Yeah, but it's supposed to look like this. But that's not what you told me. You told me to do this over here. And what do we do as leaders or entrepreneurs, that person's a problem.

We look at the person and we say the person's the issue instead of our leadership or our lack of accountability. So when people look at me and go, yeah, yeah, Chris, I know, I hear you talk about those carries and KPIs and, you know, doing the disc and values and, you know, the communication pieces, all these different, you know, making sure cultures or all these things. Yeah, I hear you, I hear you. But Chris, we need to sell more today. Well, if you get to a place of understanding how putting the right tools in place, makes a better team, better team members, better team members, then what you'll discover is you get better sales. So when somebody is to focus on the urgent, they make decisions, like I don't have time to put that thing in place. I don't have time to put that tool in place. I hear Chris talk about it. I trust him, I believe him. I know it's working for him and all the other people that are doing it. But for me, I'm just too busy right now all day. And guess what? There is yet another decision that is keeping you from getting to the destination you want to get to what are other small decisions? Do I give this client a special price? How do I handle this customer's specific complaint? Should I offer you know, a seat upgrade to this this person? Right? Whatever. I don't know what it is. What are the little decisions that you're making every single day right? All of the decisions need to be made. Even if the decision is that's a decision that doesn't need to be made. Right. There are certain things you have to look at and go That's not important right now in the moment that may be urgent but it's unimportant. So I'm going to focus on the important things, decision by decision, you start doing things that very possibly are going against the mission. You add things on or take things away out of convenience, the urgency of the moment, or the the newness of the opportunity, the new hire, that becomes just ridiculously all consuming. The new chance to make a lot more money, which is always super enticing to certain people, or that once in a lifetime opportunity to invest whatever it is, right? If the decisions that you're making are not aligning with the purpose that you have for existence, what's happening, every single one of them is just a little degree off, isn't it. And if you add up enough of those decisions, then we're not one degree off, we might be 15 degrees off, we might be 25 degrees off, right, which means that we are not going to nail our destination, instead, we're going to be very far from it. And it's going to take a whole lot of effort to get us back to it. One of those big things that I mentioned before, is the shotgun approach. Every good idea, we need to go out to this, this, this, this this. And instead of pointing us to one unified direction, I'm not saying everybody needs to be doing the same thing. That is not what you're hearing. But everybody should be moving in the same unified direction. The more we as a company as a team move in a unified direction, the better our resources are utilized. If that unified direction is based on our purpose for existence, then we are sticking on target. We are staying on target. Thank you, George Lucas. Right. But what happens to so many of us before we know it, drift has occurred? So what does it look like? What does it feel like? Well, a big piece and guys, I, I don't think I can drive this point home enough. A big piece is that the capacity of your team is reduced. Think about this.

Every single time we add something to a team, whether it be a slight change in direction, a new process, a new product line, a new service, whatever it is, every time we add that to a team, we have an effect on the team. Well, no, duh. Here's the question. If it is not properly vetted through the processes that I've talked about today, then there is a high probability, it's going to decrease your team's capacity, not increase it, but decrease it why? Because we're going to pull them in a little bit different direction, we're going to add something to them, that's more stuff on their plate, we're going to take something that might pull them away from the money making process, whatever it is, when we do not operate by adding to a team, the right stuff, the right processes, then what we do is we start to diminish their capacity. And the crazy thing is we always look at team members and go hey, do you have more capacity to do this? Oh, well, of course. I mean, what's your answer gonna be? You know, rarely? Well, it depends on the personality stuff. But every now and then we'll get a personality style that will say I don't and then for a lot of leaders that go, I'm sure you do. Well, it's it's more important, we got to do this thing instead. If we don't vet the process, correctly, through our mission, in alignment with our mission in alignment with our vision, does it fit into the strategy? Do we have the capacity to pull it off with excellence? Is it going to affect anything else? Then what happens is our team's capacity is reduced. Again, our resources get scattered and used up. Because it has to come from somewhere, right? So unless you're adding all new team members, all new money, all new, everything else, you're pulling those resources from another area. Again, you may have resources available, maybe maybe there, maybe you're not utilizing all of your resources, okay, fine. But again, if this is not something that is 100% in line with our unified direction, then even 1% off is going to affect us dramatically. Also, leaders, entrepreneurs, it is going to change Your focus, trust me, it is going to change your focus, it's going to have an impact on your focus. Now a lot of you entrepreneurs out there, get bored, because the thing that you're operating is doing really well. And many times you come to Mingo. Chris, I need to do a new thing. And I'm like, No, you don't, what we need you to do is come back and shore this thing up, fill it full of energy, make sure somebody is running it like a champion. And then we can look at doing something different. And some people listen to me, some people do not those that do not usually come back and go, I should have listened to you, I screwed that up. How do I fix it now and we fix it. If you do it the right way, then the great thing is, you do not pull your energy from what's making money. If you do it the right way. You don't distract yourself away from the team that needs you. Away from the leaders that need you the the the front line people that need you, whatever it is, right. So when you get distracted with the next shiny thing, unfortunately, the enthusiasm in your team gets diluted. Because the energy is being pulled away. When you do all of these different things, then you end up in a very special place that we call the leadership Crazy Cycle. Hashtag leadership Crazy Cycle. I said hashtag twice today. That's better. So not like me. But hey, when you end up back in the leadership Crazy Cycle, then you end up stressed, you end up overwhelmed, you end up not knowing what you did today. You end up fighting for a moment's peace, you end up coming home to your spouse. And when they say what did you do today? You say I don't have a clue. But I know it was a lot. When you are in the leadership Crazy Cycle, you end up overwhelmed and stressed.

And a lot of this comes from decisions that we make day after day after day, focusing on the wrong stuff or not running them through the right filters. So what's the point? Every decision must be judged against the standard of the mission. If you want to avoid mission drift, then you need to make sure that you're putting processes in place that go through all of those questions that I asked, Does this align with the mission? Is this moving in the same direction as our vision? Is this keeping the whole team in a unified direction heading in the unified direction is going to pull necessary resources away from more currently doing? Is this going to cause the team's capacity to diminish? All of these things that I'm talking about right now? are ways that if you just ask the right questions, you can avoid mission drift. Now. This leads us to the second concept of avoiding mission drift, but you're going to have to come back next week to get points two and three. There you go. There's the cliffhanger for the avoiding Mission Drift episodes. We will see you next week. Hopefully this has helped you today. Start asking those questions. Start walking through your decision making through those processes. And you will start to see a better, more unified more on target vision. Folks, as always take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.

Subscribe to show:

.