LEAD 6143 Module 1 Mission and Values Alignment Analysis Example

Every Patient, Mostly Suburban Donors: Testing a Regional Blood Center's Operations and Leadership Incentives Against Its Mission

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6143: Strategic Operations Planning and Innovation

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I direct collections operations at a composite nonprofit regional blood center that supplies 38 hospitals in the Ohio River valley. Our mission statement promises "a safe and sufficient blood supply for every patient in our region," and our values list stewardship, integrity and service to all communities. Missions are easy to praise and hard to test. This paper tests ours against three kinds of evidence: where we collect blood, who donates and what we reward our staff and managers for, and asks whether leadership behavior and operations line up with what the mission promises.

Why Alignment Matters

Research suggests that a mission statement's value lies less in its wording than in how far an organization lines up its practices behind it. Bart et al. (2001), studying 83 large organizations in Canada and the United States, found that mission statements affected financial performance only indirectly: commitment to the mission and the degree to which an organization aligned its internal structure, policies and procedures with the mission were associated with employee behavior, and that behavior was most directly related to performance. For a blood center, performance means units on hospital shelves when patients need them, but the lesson carries over. A mission that operations ignore is decoration.

Evidence 1: Where We Collect

Last year the center ran 1,940 mobile blood drives. Seventy-one percent were held at suburban employers, high schools and churches in the region's outer counties, which produce large, efficient drives with high turnout per staff hour. Urban neighborhoods and rural counties together accounted for 18% of drives, though they hold more than 40% of the region's population. The reason is operational: a suburban corporate drive yields about 45 units in a day with a standard crew, while a neighborhood drive at a community center often yields 15 to 20.

Evidence 2: Who Donates

The drive schedule shapes the donor base. Donors who identify as Black make up about 6% of our active donors, against roughly 14% of the regional population. That gap matters most for patients with sickle cell disease, who often need frequent transfusions with closely matched blood. Chou et al. (2013), studying 182 patients with sickle cell disease at a children's hospital, found high rates of red cell alloimmunization even when patients received Rh-matched blood from African American donors, and genotyping revealed variant Rh alleles in most patients and donors. The finding does not argue against matching; it suggests that finding truly compatible units requires a large and diverse pool of donors of African ancestry. Last year our center imported 1,120 antigen-matched units from other centers for sickle cell patients at the region's children's hospital, at higher cost and with delays of up to three days.

Evidence 3: What We Reward

Operations managers and drive coordinators are evaluated chiefly on units collected per staff hour and on the percentage of drive goals met. A coordinator who books a suburban corporate drive meets both measures easily; one who books three neighborhood drives in the same week looks inefficient. Kerr (1975) warned that organizations often pay for one thing and then wonder why they do not get another; our incentives fit the warning exactly: we hope for service to all communities and reward collection efficiency. Our managers are not ignoring the mission; they are responding exactly as our scorecard tells them to. The same pattern runs up the organization: my own annual bonus as director is tied to total units collected and cost per unit, with no measure of who donates or which patients are served locally.

Evidence 4: What Community Partners Say

Numbers explain what the schedule produces but not why some communities give less. To fill that gap I spoke with the leaders of three organizations that once hosted drives in the city's west end: a pastor, a sorority chapter president and the director of a community health center. Their accounts were consistent. Drives in their neighborhoods had been canceled twice in recent years when crews were reassigned to larger corporate drives, the appointment system required an email address that many older residents do not use and no one from the center had explained why donations from their communities mattered for patients with sickle cell disease. The pastor said his congregation includes three families with children who have the disease, and none knew that their own donations could help. These are not complaints about donors' willingness. They describe an organization that made giving harder for exactly the donors its mission most needs.

Leadership Behavior

Leadership behavior reinforces the incentives. At monthly operations meetings, executives, including me, open with the units-per-hour chart and congratulate the highest-yield teams. The children's hospital's requests for matched units appear on a separate report that reaches the medical director but not the collections team. In a year of meetings, I cannot recall a single discussion of where our donors live or how the drive schedule affects patients who need matched blood. What leaders pay attention to signals what matters, and our attention has been on efficiency.

Where Alignment Holds

The analysis is not entirely critical. On safety, the first word of the mission, alignment is strong: donor screening, testing and quality systems receive the most leadership attention and the most investment, and our deviation rates are low. On sufficiency in the aggregate, the center also performs well, maintaining more than three days of supply for common blood types through most of the year. The misalignment is specific: "every patient" and "service to all communities" are where operations and incentives fall short.

Limits of the Evidence

The analysis has limits. Donor race and ethnicity are self-reported and missing for about 9% of donors. The import figures come from one hospital's requests and may understate the region's full need. And the conversations with community partners reflect three relationships, not a survey. Still, the separate pieces point the same way, which makes the conclusion more secure than any piece alone.

Implications

Three implications follow for the strategic planning this course will build toward. First, the scorecard must include at least one measure tied to the misaligned part of the mission, such as the share of donors from underrepresented communities or the proportion of sickle cell patients' matched units supplied locally. Second, leaders must change what they attend to, opening operations meetings with the children's hospital's matched-unit report alongside the efficiency chart. Third, the higher cost per unit of neighborhood drives must be treated as an investment in the mission rather than as inefficiency to be eliminated. Module 2 will assess what each stakeholder group needs from the center before any change is planned.

Conclusion

Tested against operating data, the center's mission holds for safety and for overall supply and fails for the phrase "every patient." The failure is not a matter of bad intentions but of alignment: a drive schedule, a donor base and an incentive system built for efficiency, and leaders whose attention follows the same measures. The mission is right; the operations that are supposed to serve it need to catch up.

References

Bart, C. K., Bontis, N., & Taggar, S. (2001). A model of the impact of mission statements on firm performance. Management Decision, 39(1), 19-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000005404

Chou, S. T., Jackson, T., Vege, S., Smith-Whitley, K., Friedman, D. F., & Westhoff, C. M. (2013). High prevalence of red blood cell alloimmunization in sickle cell disease despite transfusion from Rh-matched minority donors. Blood, 122(6), 1062-1071. https://doi.org/10.1182/blood-2013-03-490623

Kerr, S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783. https://doi.org/10.2307/255378