Latest / UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps / Clear Intent: The Four Statements That Actually Align Your Organization
Transcript
- Mickey Anderson: Most companies trying to get more strategic clarity run a marketing exercise. But that's kind of like putting racing stripes and a spoiler on a fiat. She looks cute. She is not gonna win any races. Look, I'm a recovering marketer, so I know how this game is played. And today I'm gonna teach you a methodology I completely ripped off from the military, because it works. You're gonna learn the framework. The concept behind it, the four statements and how to create it for yourself. And then you'll have the foundation for everything that you want to do next with your organization. So let's dig in. This is all based off of a really important concept as we're trying to move faster and grow as an organization. We want strategic clarity for many reasons, but one is alignment. I want everyone moving in the same direction instead of fast in a bunch of different directions. And What we end up defaulting to are things like brand positioning workshops and messaging workshops because we want to sound great. We want to have something that's compelling. But we end up focusing on what the outside is going to hear as opposed to the reality inside. And what we really need to do is start inside the organization operationally, what's true, what's happening now, who are we? Who are we not? Who are we aspiring to be? So that way when it does come time. To run your marketing workshop and to start making your incredible taglines and marketing messages, you have this beautiful, clear foundation of who you actually are within the organization to build that from. Instead of coming up with an on the fly and focusing more on what sounds good and what's going capture more of the TAM than what's actually true today. The other side of this is internally. And when we look inside, oftentimes we find silos within the organization. We have tons of incredible people moving really fast, but they don't all share the same language, the same direction. They don't necessarily understand who we are, where we're moving, all in the same way. And that leads us to this place where we end up, which is called centralized control, where you have one or a few decision makers who hold the keys to the kingdom. They are driving this ship, so to speak. They are making all of the most important decisions. They are creating the vision for the teacher. They hold the most important futuristic context for the company. And they end up the decision bottleneck, the speed bump on the path to moving forward as an organization. They often are so separated from the groundwork that's happening that they're creating plans and strategies and handing it down. And it's just not gonna work. And it doesn't work because it's not really taken into consideration what's happening on the ground. What we want to move to for speed, for ownership, for autonomy is this concept called decentralized command, where instead of having centralized decision ownership, we've got decentralized moving. Multiple layers within the organization have the autonomy to make decisions, to build strategies and plans and to move the company forward. And instead of control, we have command, which is this overall understanding, the strategic clarity that we're talking about on what's the mission, what's the objective, what does good look like here? How do we decide what works and what doesn't work? All of that is shared and aligned. So everyone's moving the company in the same direction with speed, but all aligned as opposed to in different directions. So you can see the real sexiness of decentralized command and why it's so powerful today when everyone's got speed, but not everyone has alignment and it's a true competitive advantage. Now, if you try to shift from centralized control to decentralized command. Without that strategic clarity, you're just gonna end up with chaos. A bunch of people making decisions without really knowing what the heck we're doing or why. So we need to build that strategic clarity. And that's what we're working on today is a concept that I call clear intense. This is a simple way to get complete and consistent alignment across your organization in the most important four places operationally within your company. And I say operationally because this is not a marketing exercise. This is not something that's gonna sound really cute ⁓ in your marketing message. This is internal alignment. This is gonna be on your playbooks, on your hiring training, everywhere internally this is gonna be shared. The four statements that make a clear intent are incredibly simple. They are who we are, what we do, why we do it, and where we're going. Simple, clear, and you'll notice there's components missing that most marketers, and I've had people ask me this all the time, why don't you have who we serve in there? It's like because that's just an extra thing that everyone needs to remember is one thing, right? Four is easier to remember than five. ⁓ but also who we are and what we do encompasses that naturally. Almost every single clear intent document I've seen or developed includes some faction of who we serve in it. Especially if you're a niche organization where you have a specific market that you serve. But that's way less important than the other four. And so it's worth keeping off or encompassing in who we are and what we do than separating it out. Now let me walk you through each one of those statements and what it actually means and looks like. And then we're gonna walk through the rules on how to make sure it actually works for your organization. Who we are. It is today, who we are as an organization. What the heck is this thing? We have here, this organization, right? Simple, clean. This is your identity and character as an organization. What we do is your function and promise. It's how you serve, it's your services ultimately. But it's it's really if you have multiple services or you can't put this in a simple statement, then this is a great problem to really focus on for you. But it's the theme, it's the one thing the promise that you make in the function of your company. From that we have why we do it. This is the mission, the impact behind it. This statement is your big visionary impact that you want to have. It's the why behind it. This could be a founder's why, why they started the company. It could be the why behind why it's so important morally or philosophically to solve this problem. It doesn't really matter, but this is a really essential component because This statement makes sure that every role within the company understands what they're contributing to. Then we've got where we're going, the final statement, which is your vision for the company, where you're going. On this one, I highly recommend including data and dates because you can measure progress towards that future state. Now you don't have to have your detailed financials or anything like that here, but I'd recommend having a really clear objective here in the next five to 10 years that you can put on paper and measure against, because that aligns everyone within the organization. When they have a strategic priority group. conflict come up between two decisions, two options that can say, is this who we are? Is this what we do? Is this gonna have the impact that we want to have or why we do it? And is this going to take us where we want to go? It is the fastest, quickest decision making filter you will see. It helps avoid shiny object syndrome. And they're meant to be simple and clear. This is operating language, not marketing language. So let's walk through the rules on making this actually effective when you write them. The first rule is no buzzwords. If I see another company, right, you know, we aspire to create lasting impact on our clients and shareholder, like no, no buzzwords, no jargon, no acronyms, no internal corporate speech. This needs to be real language, simple, plain language. The next rule is the one breath rule. If it takes more than one breath to say each statement, you've gone too far. This needs to be so easy for everyone within your organization to remember. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose. We want them to hear this a couple of times on their onboarding and remember it and be able to say it without anything, with no notes, no details, just be able to rip it off at any time, in any place. That's the goal. So the longer and more convoluted you make it, the harder it is to remember. And then the last one, which is my personal favorite, is called the coffee shop rule. If you're in a coffee shop, the stranger who knows nothing about you, your company, the market, the problem, should be able to hear you say these statements and understand it, even though they don't know you or your company. That is how clear and simple this needs to be. Okay. So when we've got these four statements clarified and followed those rules, what next? Well, the first thing I want to say here is. When you're developing these, don't let this become decision by committee. This isn't something where you get the whole organization involved in to just design. It's just gonna become convoluted in a mess. This is something that the senior leadership or executive leadership team comes together to develop, or the founder with the executive leadership team come to develop themselves. This is not something that is developed by everyone on the ground. We need alignment from the top. Who really come together and create these definitions. The next is spending a couple hours on this. This is not an easy thing to go through. Anyone who's done any sort of marketing or clarity exercise knows that this isn't an overnight success story. It's gonna take a couple hours. And then once you've drafted your V1 first draft of this exercise, don't do anything for 30 days. You and the leadership team who developed this are gonna spend the next 30 days just. reflecting on it, using the language, working through it, practicing it, embodying it, speaking to it without educating anyone, without giving them an alignment speech on what you're working on, because that is going to show you whether it's true and accurate or not. It's going to bring up questions. It's going to bring up decisions. It's going to bring up reflection. And that whole 30 days of just saying it, doing it, being those four statements will give you more insight information than you'd ever asked. After your 30 days of modeling is what we call this, you're going to come together and reflect on what was true, what needs to be revised, what needs to be taken out, what's too complicated. Let's clean it up and refine it. And then from that, now that you've got this beautifully finalized document that's been worked through in real time by leadership, you can then roll that out into your organization. You can start educating, you can put it in the town halls, you can put it in the onboarding training materials. you know, do manager training on it, use it as a rallying cry. Everyone should have access to it. It should be in your playbooks. It should be anywhere and everywhere accessible to your team so that they can find it in two seconds. If that's on your SharePoint, that's great. It's on your Google Drive, that's in your playbook. Make sure that it's accessible to everyone across the organization. And that is how you create strategic clarity within the organization that turns into alignment that allows you to then Make decisions, build autonomy, move faster, create ownership within the organization, and of course, make amazing marketing messaging because you've got this real reality-based foundation to layer on. So your homework is to take time, go reflect on who you are, what you do, why you do it, and where you're going. Build those V1 documents, keep on going until next time.