MRO Today - Lead with a vision, a mission

Lead with vision, a mission

Last issue, I wrote that strategic leadership creates vision and inspires people to change. It gets organization members actively involved in building and supporting the process, and sets the whole change process into motion.

In that Coach article, I laid out five lessons for strategic leaders. This article, and upcoming articles, will expound upon these lessons. Todays lesson is, "You must be up front and objective oriented!"

What does that mean? Up front addresses the question, "Who is the leader?" Objective oriented addresses the way the leader leads.

Literature on this topic points out that people want to know who leaders are, what they think and what they want accomplished.

With that in mind . . .

" Leaders create and publish the organizations vision.

" From that, leaders develop and publish the mission.

Vision and mission statements are important strategic elements that set the tone, intensity and direction for organization activities.

Too many organizations fail to have a thought-out and understood vision and mission. Up-front leaders know these items and, more importantly, help organization members know and understand them in detail. Leaders are up front, ensuring everyone not only understands, but also owns or buys into the vision and mission statements.

In their book, "The Purchasing Machine," Dave Nelson, Patricia Moody and Jon Stegner identify the 10 best companies in North America. The authors point out that each company has great supply management leaders, people who establish a vision to be the best and set the mission and objectives to achieve it. The results are world-class operations. We can all inspire to do the same thing.

Similarly, literature clearly shows the significance of well-established objectives. From the vision and mission, leaders incite action by setting dynamic organization objectives, establishing new relationships that foster efficiencies and effectiveness, and empowering people to work smarter, not harder. Organization objectives are like the vision and mission. People must see and understand their part in the big picture.

Leaders can shake an organization to its roots with dynamic objectives that motivate people to behave differently. Objectives must be clearly defined, published and understood, measurable with metrics, achievable with stretch, and continuous in the sense theres always something in front of us.

As leaders, we must ensure our people know and understand how to use new supply management processes. We must empower them to take action in order to make supply process changes. Leaders work with their strategic teams to establish and prioritize objectives.

Our vision must be to have best-in-class MRO processes for our company. From that, we can establish objectives concerning best practices that are most important to us. These can relate to:
" cost management/reductions
" supplier base consolidation/rationalization
" supplier development
" using value engineering/value analysis on products, processes
" improving MRO materials or services activities
" better utilization of suppliers

Every CEO expects more from the supply system. To make immediate progress in these areas, we need:

1) leadership decisions to establish the practice in our operations;

2) training and development to apply processes to the best practice;

3) metrics, measurements, audits and publication of results to show progress; and

4) a system of rewards for suppliers and others who achieve success.

The theories, processes and techniques to do these things exist. We need up-front, objective-oriented leadership to incorporate them and make a difference in our system.

NAPM and its MRO Group, along with the NAPM affiliates, offer many leadership opportunities that help develop professional leadership talents applicable to MRO supply processes. Similarly, NAPM and its affiliates offer many economical training programs that can help you and your MRO organization. Take advantage of these opportunities.

Robert Kemp is a consultant, speaker and the former president of the National Association of Purchasing Management. He can be reached at

This article appeared in the April/May 2001 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2001.