Before you can lead people anywhere, you have to know where you’re going — and so do they.

Alice comes to a fork in the road and looks up at the Cheshire Cat. She asks which way she ought to go from here. The Cat answers that it depends a good deal on where she wants to get to. Alice says she doesn’t much care where. The Cat tells her, then, that it doesn’t much matter which way she goes.

I have carried that exchange with me for a long time, because I have watched it play out in real organizations more times than I can count. A team is busy. Everyone is moving. There is energy in the building and activity on every calendar. And when you stop and ask a simple question: where are we all trying to get to, you get four different answers from four capable people who each believe they are pulling in the same direction.

They are not lost because they are lazy or unskilled. They are lost because no one set the Azimuth.

An Azimuth, in the plainest terms, is a bearing. Your “True North.” It is the direction you take to reach a specific point. In the Army we did not wander toward an objective and hope to arrive. We fixed the azimuth, and then every decision, every adjustment, every hard call in the dark measured itself against that bearing. The first of the Big 6 Leadership Principles® is Set the Azimuth for exactly this reason. Before you can lead people anywhere, you have to know where you are going, and so do they.

Why Direction Comes Before Everything Else

Set the Azimuth has four components, and I will walk through all four across this part of the series. They are Mission, Intent, Values, and Cultural Behaviors. Together they form what I call the organizational azimuth. Miss any one of them and the bearing drifts, sometimes so slowly that no one notices until the team is miles from where it needed to be.

Mission comes first because it answers the most basic question a group of people can ask themselves. “Who are we?” “What do we do?” and “Why do we do it?” That sounds almost too simple to matter. It is not. Most of the dysfunction I am called in to help with traces back, once you follow it far enough, to a mission that was never made clear or was written once and then forgotten in a drawer.

A real mission is not a plaque in the lobby. It is not a paragraph the marketing team polished so it would sound impressive on the website. A real mission is the thing every person in the organization can say back to you in their own words, and mean it, because they understand how their work connects to it.

The Difference Between Motion and Direction

Here is the trap. Motion feels like progress. A busy organization looks healthy from the outside. People are working long hours, hitting deadlines, closing deals. But motion without a shared Azimuth is just expensive drift.

I have met with leadership teams who were exhausted and proud of it, and when I asked them to write down the mission independently, no two versions matched. That is not a communication problem you fix with a memo. It is an Azimuth problem. The reason people were working so hard and feeling so frustrated was that their effort had no common point on the horizon to aim at. Every one of them was doing good work but was working toward a different destination.

When you set a clear mission, something changes that is hard to describe until you have seen it. Decisions get faster, because people can measure a choice against the bearing instead of escalating it upward. Meetings get shorter. The endless low-grade friction between departments eases, because the friction was never really about personalities. It was about people optimizing for different destinations and colliding in the middle.

Setting the mission is the first component of the Organizational Azimuth. Below, I lay out how to build one that holds, the three questions it has to answer, and the test I use to know whether a mission is real or just words on a wall. Paid subscribers continue below.

How to Build a Mission That Holds

A mission that holds has to answer three questions, and it has to answer them in language a new hire could repeat on their second day. Who we are. What we do. Why we do it.

The first question, who we are, is about identity. Not your industry category, your identity. Two companies can make the same product and be entirely different organizations because they understand themselves differently. When I work with a leadership team on this, I push past the obvious answer. A distributor does not exist to move boxes. A hospital does not exist to fill beds. Get to the identity underneath the transaction, because that is what people commit to.

The second question, what we do, sounds like the easy one, and it is where teams get sloppy. They list everything. A mission that tries to include every product line and service offering is not a mission, it is a catalog. The discipline here is subtraction. What is the core work that, if you stopped doing it, would mean you were no longer you. Name that. Let the rest be strategy, which changes, rather than mission, which should not.

The third question, why we do it, is the one that carries the weight. This is where the service technician I have written about before comes to mind, the one who described his day not as fixing nine cars but as making nine families safer. Same work, entirely different why. The why is what turns a job into a mission and a workforce into a committed team. When people understand the why, you get comprehension instead of compliance, and comprehension is the whole game.

The Test I Use

Here is how I know whether a mission is real. I ask people at every level of the organization, separately and without warning, to tell me the mission in their own words. Not recite it. Tell me what it means and how their work connects to it.

If the answers rhyme, even in different languages, the Azimuth is set. If the answers scatter, the mission lives on a wall and nowhere else, and no amount of strategy layered on top of it will hold, because there is no bearing underneath.

This is unglamorous work. It does not feel like leadership in the heroic sense. But I have never seen a Level Five Culture of Commitment built on a fuzzy mission, and I have never seen a clear mission fail to make everything downstream of it easier.

Set the bearing first. Everything else is navigation.

I’d love to hear how you would answer those three questions for your own organization right now, without checking the website.

Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!