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. 

The Solyndra bankruptcy shows how one and two-dimensional leadership decisions miss the mark for the Obama administration, the company and the nation.  One-Dimensional leadership is all about “me” not the mission.  Two-dimensional leadership sets up “us vs. them” dynamics, and three-dimensional leadership focuses on “we,” as in “we the people.”  

The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context (MRC) focuses leaders on behavioral and character traits necessary to achieve the three essentials that contribute to organizational success.  Three-dimensional leaders consistently focus on the mission and get people at all levels of the organization to do likewise. Properly focused leaders negotiate the context appropriately to deploy resources and continually align them so employees can succeed at their jobs. Thus their organizations have a high potential to succeed. 

The federal government should see the big picture context of “we the people.”  By investing in a private enterprise, everyone concerned looses sight of the mission.  Solyndra should have focused on the mission of designing a business whose products and pricing would appeal to customers.  Instead it focused on lobbying the government for money.  The government should not be creating “us vs. them” situations by pitting one private company against the others. The mission of government is to do what is in the best interest of “we, the people.”  It should not be betting on winers and losers in the marketplace.   

When governments and private companies put their individual interests, above our collective interest, it’s “we the people” who lose. The Obama administration’s Solyndra scandal is a self-centered solicitous affair that is two-dimensional at best. Since the company head was a fund raiser for Obama, however, it appears the funding was a quid pro quo that benefitted them at the expense of US.   

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?