My functional motivation motivates others to function.

Employees of The Bank are apparently encouraged to add "Leadership Statements" to their e-mail signatures. Here is a sampling:


"My Leadership Causes Success Through Teamwork and the Success of Each Member"

"My Leadership Causes a Comfortable Work Environment"

"My leadership makes potential become reality"

"My leadership causes hard work and determination in myself and others!"

"My leadership accelerates consensus!"

"My leadership creates results through accountability."

"My leadership is the catalyst for inspiring compassion, integrity and excellence in others."

My first thought was to add comments to each of these but to be honest, I can't think of any snide ridicule that I could heap on these statements any worse than the statements themselves. I suppose they could be forgiven for bad grammar since no one is proofreading their work, but what are these people thinking? Is this what they really believe leadership is about?

And The Bank is no better. Even though these following statements were surely built by committees, these mission statements posted on signage around the offices really aren't much better:


"We challenge reality to accomplish the impossible."

"Utilizing the power of diversity and imagination, we conquer boundaries, redefining tomorrow."


Oh, the pain! You can read those statements over and over again and still not derive any meaning from them. It may be naive of me to believe that a mission statement should actually be a statement of the department or business's mission , but is that the way it's supposed to be? If it had meaning then the managers would be actually held accountable if they didn't measure up. Do they come up with that crap specifically to avoid that sort of responsibility or do they really believe that the employees are too stupid to realize it meaninglessness?