A vision statement is an
organisational statement that declares what the organisation hopes to become.
One of the primary roles of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is to form the
vision for the organisation to bridge the needs, requirements, and aspirations
of its internal and external stakeholders.
The organisation's mission
statement is secondary to the formulation of the Vision Statement. The CEO is
instrumental in defining the mission, which addresses the organisation's
purpose.
Organisational Purpose
An organisation's purpose is
its mission. However, developing an organisational Mission Statement requires a
deep understanding of what the organisation hopes to achieve and why. A mission
statement is brief in format but, if constructed well, effectively communicates
the organisation's values and ambitions.
Within the UK social housing
sector, the Mission Statement addresses what the social housing enterprise
offers and how it will serve its customers, community, staff, and stakeholders.
A mission Statement may also include the principles the social housing
enterprise values and wishes to abide by.
A typical example of a
Mission Statement within the social housing sector might be, "Our mission
is to make a sustainable, positive change to the housing crisis for our
customers and communities".
Role of CEO
The primary role of a CEO is
to develop a Mission Statement that helps to guide the organisation's actions
and values and provides a "go-to" statement for the organisation's
staff that builds trust, understanding, and empowerment.
A Mission Statement also
assists the Management Team with making decisions or forming new strategies
that underpin the fundamental values, corporate strategy, and the
organisation's value-for-money objectives.
Developing a Mission
Statement is a crucial success factor in formulating an organisation's business
strategy. It promotes a sense of shared expectations in staff and is considered
increasingly important in the social housing sector's small-to medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs).
Appreciating the Political
Scene
A significant reason for the growing importance of mission and value statements is the
growing political complexity and socioeconomic environments within which social
housing enterprises must operate and be managed to enable them to identify what
they need to achieve.
The Mission Statement has
become a management tool used over the last few decades as the role of social
housing enterprises has changed from merely a housing provider to one where the
social needs and arguably the wellbeing of the local community increasingly
rely.
The vision statement has
been deemed strategically critical to the success of a social housing
enterprise in developing a meaningful Mission Statement. This is based on the
findings of recent research into the social housing sector within the UK by the
National Housing Federation.
The study investigated the
existence and content of a social housing enterprise's Vision and Mission
Statements to determine the relationships (if any) between the development of a
meaningful Mission Statement and selected performance outcomes of the social
housing enterprise.
Implementing an Organisation's
Strategy
The CEO assumes overall
leadership for implementing an organisation's strategy. Their primary role is
to inspire trust, empower, and build self-confidence among strategy
implementers and ensure their participation.
They must motivate them to
higher productivity while providing the overall direction for the
organisation's strategy, which the social housing enterprise's external
stakeholders and customers are increasingly steering.
An organisation's strategy
is sometimes driven from the top down. An emergent strategy arises from the
unplanned actions and initiatives of an organisation's Middle Management Team.
It is typically viewed as the product of spontaneous innovation and is often a
direct result of the daily prioritisation of decisions made by staff and Teams.
However, the Resource-Based
View (RBV) of strategy is a model that sees the organisation's resources as the
key to formulating its strategic direction. RBV is an approach to achieving
organisational customer, community, staff, and stakeholder advantage that
emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.
RBV was reinforced by the
works published by Prahalad and Hamel ("The Core Competence of the
Corporation"), Wernerfelt, B. ("The Resource-Based View of the
Firm"), and Barney, J. ("Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive
Advantage"), amongst others.
Driving Organisational
Mission Values
Organisational staff and
Teams must understand an organisation's strategy. Only if they understand the
strategy can they dissect it into individual activities that they must complete
to implement it.
The critical primary driver
of this is the CEO, who must be ably supported by their Executive Management
Team, who will have formulated the social housing enterprise's Vision and
Mission Statements together.
Social housing enterprises
are increasingly leading the way in providing housing standards that engender
the home as the foundation of improved living standards within society. Recent
initiatives have focused on improving society's norms by delivering high-quality,
low-cost housing, utilising assets supporting central and local government's
net carbon zero targets.
Leadership in Social Housing
Today's CEOs are accountable
for more than their organisation's financial performance. They are increasingly
responsible for creating social value for their organisation's performance.
They must report to increasing stakeholders, from staff, Management Teams and
Board Members to customers, clients, and the community.
The leadership style adopted
within social housing enterprises since the late 1970s has become more
entrepreneurial and less top-down bureaucratic. The actions of Middle
Management Teams are increasingly driving strategy.
Teams and staff are guided
by the direction, mentoring and coaching leadership styles of today's CEOs, who
increasingly focus on leading with authenticity, humanity, and heart to serve
as a societal leader. They use their influence to advocate for policies on
critical issues, such as improving housing standards at reduced costs whilst
meeting strenuous net carbon zero targets.
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