Last year, our Leadership Team took part in an exercise to help bring clarity to what we believed the Mission, Vision, and Values of Mid-Plains Center should become. We talked at length about the “why” behind our existence as a non-profit in the human service field and what that should mean for how we go about all that we do. Together we asked ourselves the following question:
“Why should we ask our staff get up in the morning and invest their time, talent, and energy here and not somewhere else?”
We tried to envision how our community should be better because of the work we do as we evaluated the values that we felt were the most critical to achieving and maintaining that success.
I’m proud to see how the work we did then continues to reflect the work that we are doing today. While our Mission and Vision help to define and direct us toward our future, the real difference is made in the daily practice of our Values. As I told our Leadership Team, we cannot allow these to become just words on a page. Rather, we must believe so strongly in our Values that any consistent failure to aspire to them becomes our primary grounds for termination, more so than even performance. The continual striving towards our Values must be non-negotiable, and I’m seeing evidence of that growth on a daily basis.
Why do I believe these matter so much? It is precisely because I cannot expect someone to choose to work at an agency that fails to consistently display integrity or does not prioritize excellence. It is because I would not want to be part of an organization where there is no support or collaboration amongst coworkers, or where what they do doesn’t create any real impact on the communities they serve. That’s not who we are, and that’s not who we will become.
So while writing our values down and printing them in a blogpost doesn’t provide them with any special power, you do. Your commitment to living our values day-in and day-out, even on the hard days, is the very thing that is turning our Mission and our Vision into our reality. I hope you are as proud as I am for who we are becoming and what that means for the future of Mid-Plains Center.
—Chase Francl, CEO
