The Mission Always Wins

Almost every leader I know will tell you that among the first leadership books they ever read was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. For most, the book was recommended to them right after they led a project or engaged in an initiative that wasn’t effective. Sometimes they read it after a big flop. And for many, this book was a career saver.

All it takes is a glance at the table of contents to see why it has sold tens of millions of copies and is lauded by everyone from business leader Tom Peters to personal growth guru Tony Robbins; from Senator Mitt Romney to Olympic Champion Michael Phelps and poet laureate Maya Angelou. The chapter titles are now maxims that are embraced by leaders around the world:

“Begin with the end in mind.”

“Put first things first.”

And especially “think win-win.”

A “win-win” mentality is perhaps one of the most treasured pieces of advice for the new leader. It reminds us that whenever possible—for the good of the team, in order to foster collegiality and collaboration—we should look for solutions to the problems that keep everybody engaged in and invested in the outcome. In a world that often feels so competitive (even among colleagues!), “win-win” solutions are like a ray of light in the darkness. They offer both hope and a way forward.

But what if that ray of light is actually blinding you from seeing and facing a difficult but necessary way ahead? What if instead of a win-win solution that pleases everyone, the moment calls for a hard decision that requires stakeholders to let go of something that has been important or dear to them? What if the only way forward really requires one of the teammates to take a back seat, play second chair, or let go of one of the personally motivating factors behind even taking on the challenge?

Win-win solutions often mask the deeper organizational problem of a lack of missional alignment among various stakeholders. I was in a trustees meeting at the seminary where I served as a senior administrator when one of the trustees, himself a retired president of a university, shared the struggle of trying to bring a unified vision to an academic institution.

“That university,” he said, “was 28,000 faculty, students, and staff all unified together around a common parking problem.”

That line got a huge roar from the other trustees and the executive team in the room. He was reminding us that it didn’t matter if we were a mid-size seminary or a large, nationally ranked university, the same mental model often existed in academic institutions. They weren’t created because of a unified strategy, but for uniting multiple constituent “schools” or “colleges” into one larger entity.[1] Because of that, different constituents of faculty, staff, administrators, parents, and even students often had vastly different agendas, with different motivations, that had never been reconciled in one shared mission.

At those times, the desire to find a win-win solution was not actually a solution to a real problem but a way that leaders unconsciously tried to lower the conflict of the moment. The result was that the different factions came to feel better about the decision, but often didn’t actually make progress.

Because many of us are people pleasers, often a win-win solution can simply be a way of pleasing those stakeholders that a leader can’t stomach disappointing. And in the worst scenario, the compromises of win-win solutions that make everyone happy momentarily further the actual conditions for continued decline.

Leadership, then, isn’t so much skillfully helping a group accomplish what they want to do (that is management). Leadership is taking people where they need to go and yet resist going. It’s challenging, encouraging, and equipping people to be transformed more and more into the kind of community that can accomplish the mission set before them. And very often the very people who called us to lead them are disappointed when we do.

Transformational leadership, then, is always a two-front battle: On one side is the challenge of a changing world, unfamiliar terrain and the test of finding new interventions that will enable the mission to move forward in a fruitful and faithful way. On the other side are the stakeholders who resist the very change that is necessary for the mission’s survival. If adaptive leadership is “enabling a people to grow so they can face their greatest challenges and thrive,” then it is crucial to acknowledge that a significant part of the “greatest challenge” is internal. Deftly handling resistance and the disappointment that comes along with it so that a community of people can accomplish a goal for the greater good is the core capacity of adaptive leadership.

So, if win-win doesn’t work in the face of adaptive challenges, what does?

A simple-to-understand but difficult-to-implement mantra: The mission always wins.

Always.

Every. Time. In every conflict.

Not the leader.

Not the donors who pay the bills.

Not the most loyal and long-suffering teammates.

Not the new people who have been recruited and uprooted their lives to join the cause.

Not those who scream the loudest or who are most in pain.

In a healthy organization, the mission wins every argument. The focused, shared, missional purpose of the organization wins over every other competing value.

It’s more important than my preferences or personal desire.

It’s more critical than my leadership style, experience, or past success.

It’s the grid by which we evaluate every other element in organization.

It’s the criterion for determining how we will spend our money, who we will hire and fire, which programs we will start and which ones we will shut down.

It’s the tiebreaker in every argument and it is the principle by which we evaluate every partnership.

Every time, in every decision, the key question is: Does it further our mission?

[1] “In the United States, the designation [university] is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school.” Wikipedia, “University,” https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/University.