Eighteen Minutes on One Sentence
“Words alone do not suffice.”
This week I sat down with Charlotte, Rosie, and Rebecca to lock our mission, vision, values, and unique value proposition (UVP), as our old ones were collecting dust.
We have gone through a massive repositioning and had a handful of meetings this spring where we workshopped them. We are mid website redesign and launching the (amazing!!) new Groops platform, so we needed to lock this down asap.
Each week, we are tackling something that moves this forward. Last week, we kicked off our intro to EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and yesterday, we committed to finalizing the mission, vision, values, and UVP. I built the deck, set the rules for the room, and told everyone the first slide, the UVP, would be the easy one because we had already agreed on it back in June.
It took us eighteen minutes to get through one sentence. I felt my little internal impatient part start to rise, not because anything was wrong, but because I thought this was already settled and I wondered how long we were going to circle this. But my more reasonable core self said, "Chill, this is the work. We will get somewhere good."
It is like chewing a tough cut of meat. It is kind of exhausting, but it is not good for anyone if you swallow it whole without doing the work. It creates problems down the line. My jaw was tired but I kept chewing. We all kept chewing.
We argued about whether "psychologist-led" would make our non-psychologist coaches feel like second-class citizens, even though everyone has at least a Master's. We argued about the word "enabled," which Rosie liked because it sounds like software and Charlotte disliked because it sounds ugly. Somewhere in the middle Charlotte said, "But I think we made it better," and she was right. We finally landed on something we all got behind completely and are excited about. It just flows.
Groops is a Team Intelligence System. Psychologist-led, platform-powered.
It signals the human, the expert, and the platform in one simple sentence. We are a system that assesses, coaches, and provides ongoing insight.
I have run this exercise for a lot of organizations. What I keep relearning from the inside is that the sentence is not the deliverable. The wrestling with it is. And it only works when the team builds it together.
What a Shared Goal Actually Does
People sometimes think a mission and vision are a branding exercise. They are, but they are much deeper than that. They are the articulation of a shared goal, and a shared goal is where most group behavior starts.
It directs attention, so people know which of the fifteen reasonable things in front of them is the one that counts this week. It structures behavior, so a team can resolve tradeoffs without escalating every one of them. And it filters, because it tells people whether they fit here.
Hackman, who spent decades studying why some teams outperform others, set the bar for this. A team's purpose has to be clear, challenging, and consequential. If any of it is stated but not practiced, it is useless. We lived this. Once, we had to let someone go for claiming they had run programs they hadn't, and our values at the time were too soft to be any help in that conversation. A value that cannot survive contact with a firing decision is decoration.
Private Scoreboards
Naming the mission, vision, values, and UVP is not just an exercise. It is a performance question.
Kleingeld and colleagues pulled together the research on goal setting in groups, covering 49 comparisons across roughly 740 groups. Clear group goals reliably improved performance, and specific, difficult ones improved it considerably more. That part is unsurprising.
Kleingeld also looked at goals set for individuals inside teams whose work is interdependent. When those goals were framed around maximizing their own output, group performance dropped sharply. When the same goals were framed around contribution to the group's result, performance rose (Kleingeld et al., 2011).
Same people. Same effort. Same talent. The only thing that changed was what the goal was pointed at.
That is a compensation and goal-setting design finding as much as a psychological one. If every person on an interdependent team has an individual target that rewards their own number, you have not motivated the team. You have organized it against itself, and you have created an environment where individual behavior runs in different directions, so naturally there is friction.
I see this constantly, and it rarely looks like conflict.
It looks like six competent people running six private scoreboards. Engineering optimizes for stability, sales for the quarter, product for the roadmap, and every one of them is working hard and doing exactly what they were asked.
The friction gets read as personality, when it is an alignment problem wearing a personality costume.
The Borrowed Mission
Organizations do this work at the top and then shelve it. We are guilty of a version of that ourselves, since our own capture fields from previous sessions were still blank when we walked in this week.
The bigger gap is one level down. Teams almost never do this work at all. They borrow the company's mission and assume it covers them, and a company mission is usually a level or two too abstract to settle anything in the daily workflow. It does not help an employee make a decision in the day to day. Say you are stuck trying to figure out where to spend your time. Your mission, vision, and values should help point you in the right direction. Without that roadmap, the team fills the vacuum with whatever each member privately believes the goal is, and then wonders why alignment keeps degrading between meetings.
And the document alone does not fix it. We are running about 60% of the EOS framework from Traction, and I have watched plenty of teams finish the paperwork and change nothing. The words start working when someone uses them to say no.
The Groops Take
Cohesion gets heard as warmth. It is really connection plus alignment, and decades of team research put it among the most reliable correlates of high performance. Most senior leaders know this intuitively. What we measure is whether behavior converges. A team can like each other, enjoy the offsite, and still run six private scoreboards, and that team will underperform a team with more friction and one clear goal.
One of the most common and consequential gaps we see is between where leadership believes the team's attention is pointed and where it actually is. That gap does not show up in engagement scores. It shows up in decisions that get made three times, in handoffs that keep slipping, and in senior people quietly optimizing for what they personally believe matters.
In team coaching, most of the early work is making the goal explicit and then testing it against decisions the team has already made. Once it holds, and the team starts using it to decide things, behavior can shift faster than people expect. It increases operational speed and efficiency.
Here is where we landed.
Our mission is to help teams see the dynamics that drive performance and strengthen them.
Our vision is a world where teams are the best part of the job.
Our values:
Say the hard thing
What happens in Groops stays in Groops
Human at heart, tech serves
Meet people where they're at
Think deeply, make a move
Focus on the team
Eighteen minutes on the first sentence was worth it.
Something to Try: The Load-Bearing Test
Thirty minutes with your team, and it works best unannounced.
Everyone writes the team's goal in one sentence, alone, without looking at the company deck. Two minutes, no talking. Then read them aloud with no commentary and no defending. The spread is your data, and it is usually wider than the leader expects.
Then draft one sentence together and run it through three questions.
1) Would it change a decision when the answer isn't obvious?
2) Would a new person know what to do differently because of it?
3) Does living by it cost us something we would otherwise want?
Finish by naming one thing your team says no to because of that sentence. For us, it means turning down work where a leader wants to use the sessions to build a case against one person rather than change how the team works. It costs us revenue and we still say no.
If you cannot name one, it is not load-bearing yet.
Want to Do This Work With Your Team?
Groops helps teams clarify what they are collectively trying to accomplish, translate it into working norms, and track whether behavior actually changes.
If you want help articulating your shared goals at an exec or team level, email us at info@joingroops.com. From there, we can help you operationalize them and stay accountable.
References
Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.
Kleingeld, A., van Mierlo, H., & Arends, L. (2011). The effect of goal setting on group performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(6), 1289–1304. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024315
Wickman, G. (2012). Traction: Get a grip on your business (Expanded ed.). BenBella Books.