Politicians tend to appoint to government’s most influential decision-making positions their family members, friends, paramours, significant others, chief donors and key supporters. These people often see that their main mission is to help their politicians gain the name recognition they need to continue to get elected to office every two to four years.  Consequently, many appointees use their positions to dream up costly, politically motivated initiatives designed to make a headline or photo opportunity for them and their politicians. The initiatives make great sound bites, but in reality often lack not only a working knowledge of available resources but also the contextual awareness and detail to coordinate the various operational elements to make programs effective. 

As a former statewide government program administrator, I improved underperforming government services by instilling pride and focussing employees on performance and productivity processes.  The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context explains that government has challenges with efficiency often because its leaders only function within two of the three MRC essentials necessary to achieve effective operations.  

Even simple things are overlooked like coordinating the job titles and partner relationships that are necessary to provide services in ways that deliver meaningful outcomes to the public.  While many appointees can recite a government agency’s mission statement, their behaviors painfully demonstrate to gifted and skilled civil servants that they have no actual experience in what they are tasked to manage or oversee. 

The new initiatives often are out of synch with why the program was established, and how it was set up to operate.  The heavy handed way appointees tend to go about implementing them demonstrates the lack of people skills and leadership abilities necessary to effectively coordinate large numbers of people across multiple departments.  Many a civil servant has been idled as a result. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied the synthesis of mission, vision, and values into a strategic plan.  Here is an excerpt from chapter two of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context: 

• Dr. King’s mission was equality. 
• His vision was expressed beautifully in his “I Have a Dream” speech.  
• And his values were nonviolence. 

A strategic plan says, “We will use these resources to accomplish this mission that will get us to our vision as we pursue it with these values.”  

As a leader, Dr. King successfully rallied people to the mission of equality. The values of nonviolence fueled the operational engine that propelled the people of his organization to persevere by focusing on achieving the vision of nonviolent revolution.  Once volunteers rallied to the cause, Dr. King focused them on the organization’s values—so much so that his marchers faced violent and murderous opposition in the most hostile environments, yet they persevered in carrying out the organization’s mission with the values of nonviolence.   

Dr. King embodied three-dimensional leadership.  He keenly understood the mission, and passionately articulated a vision to achieve it. King stated his mission and vision so clearly that it was easy for people to follow him, to see what he was talking about, and to believe that if he could do it, they also could.  He organized people and resources around a set of values that they consistently lived and applied.  King helped his followers negotiate the hostile context as a team that often locked arms together and sang “We Shall Overcome!”  The America we live in today is in large part the fruition of the vision—the Dream, which was the focus of Dr. King’s life. 

Are you following Dr. King’s example and embodying the mission, vision, and values of your organization?

America is organized around the our Constitution’s value system that empowers us to be “one nation under God.” The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context advocates achieving goals by rallying people to the mission that matters most. 3-D Leaders never loose sight of the main thing, cause, or reason why the organization exists.  

On May 5, 2010, Morgan Hill, California’s Live Oak High School Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez, lost sight of the American mission, when he sent five students home for wearing clothing displaying the American flag on Cinco de Mayo, stating the garments were “incendiary.”  One-gimensional leaders ignore the main mission to pursue agendas that undermine it. Mr. Rodriguez meeds to understand that everyday in the USA is American Flag Day! 

As an American, I welcome to this nation anyone who wants to participate in the value system that has made us a healthy, stable and prosperous society. That value system is rooted in the Bible’s Ten Commandments, and “Turn the other cheek.”  Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and “Do not others as you want others to do unto you.”

The school superintendent intervened and said. “No one will be punished for wearing patriotic clothing.” A federal judge, however, just ruled the students violated the Mexican students constitutional rights.  People who advocate celebrating alternative heritages by denigrating America’s needlessly are setting up two-dimensional “us vs. them” dynamics. American values enable one to exercise free speech to support almost any cause, but only shall be able to do so as long as our Constitutional values remain the main thing. Manipulating diversity issues to bash the symbols of America’s values only serve one-dimensional, “It's all about me” agendas, and not the mission of America as “We the people, one nation under God.”