Vision and the Goal Achievement Model

3.1 The Need for Vision and Goals

It is said that “if you don’t know where you are going, then you will never know when you have arrived.” I would like to modify this statement and add an additional thought to focus it on the topic of change management. “As a leader within your company, if you don’t know where you are going, then you will never be able to put in place processes that will get you there and you never will arrive.” This statement makes two important points. First you need a vision to define where you want your firm to go. Second, you need a plan that will enable you to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Imagine a company that has in place a very reactive maintenance work culture. Its vision of maintenance is to arrive at work in the morning, find out what broke down over night, and then react by making repairs to the equipment and returning it to service as soon as possible. This firm’s idea of a vision is to have a day when production isn’t complaining about equipment in need of repair, how long it takes maintenance to make repairs, or the sub-standard quality of the repairs.

Now suppose you arrive on the scene as the new maintenance manager. You have recently been hired to bring to the company the techniques you used at your former firm which changed its extremely reactive work culture to one that was reliability focused. In addition, you helped to improve production by reducing breakdowns, and you provided effective and efficient maintenance services by addressing predictive and preventive maintenance strategies vs. the “break it – fix it” mode of reactive maintenance.

As the new maintenance leader, you have three tasks at hand. The first step is to show the organization that what it is doing, while getting breakdowns repaired and production back on line, is not an effective or efficient solution to the maintenance problem. This effort is not simple and is entirely focused on changing the work culture. I will hold off on this discussion for now because it is the topic that is addressed in the balance of this book. Instead, what I want to discuss are the other two tasks: creating the vision of the future (step 2) and providing the plant with the next steps to achieve it (step3). Figure 3-1 shows the three steps you need to take if you want to get over the hurdle blocking you from successfully changing the work culture.