Organization with a Perpetual Positive Cycle of Excellence

We read a lot about Excellence at multiple levels like individual, team, organization, etc.; talk about facets that are important to bring about excellence within oneself or an organization; attend a lot of training courses on achieving personal excellence either in general or in specific areas like Sales, Customer relations, Production, Supply chain etc. Do we see the results that seemed to be possible after attending these sessions or reading those books? Most of the times, the answer would be NO. If we ponder over the reasons, one that comes up pretty frequently is that I do not have the right settings to implement these ideas, or I do not have complete buy-in for all these ideas across the organization, or something similar. So is there any way that we can create the organization which will help us breed excellence and nurture it so that it spreads across and grows continuously? Another thing comes to mind is that I am not at a powerful position in the organization to effect the change across so how do I bring this change? There is also a fear about acceptability of the concepts as well as outcomes of the change?

There are multiple ways to create such an organization and I will be discussing one of the ways in this article. However before that, let us deliberate a little on the fear of results as well as position in the organization hierarchy to effect the changes across the organization. Fear of results or fear of acceptability will be present whenever one tries to do some change from their present stable process be it on the organization side like changing the goods distribution mechanism or on personal side like changing from personal transport to public transport for commuting between home to office. One just needs to anticipate some possible outcomes other than the expected ones and prepare oneself to face the same. E.g. you may want to stock up the distribution depots sufficiently before switching to the new method so that even if something goes wrong, you will have some time to correct without giving any problems to business. It is also observed that this fear slowly comes down as one starts progressing on the path and achieves some milestones at desired pace so start slow, plan well and implement each step on the way meticulously. Keep the tab on results/reactions you are getting vis-a-vis expected and keep on tuning the change.

Any change an organization adopts, never adopted at organization as a whole. It is typically conceptualized, prototyped, finetuned, socialized and then implemented. So when you have some idea which you want to implement, it will be first implemented small so implement it in the small team which you might be leading; show case the result and take it to the organization level in step by step manner. The acceptability of change is more if it is backed by some results at multiple levels. So if you want to create an organization that breeds excellence and nurtures it, you may want to create this in a small team working in one area and then transmit the results as seed to other teams to build their organization on same principles which slowly rise to the organization level. So although it might take a longer time to implement this change than if you were a CEO of the company, it will surely get implemented as it is showing results.

When we are setting up the organization / team we need to look at following aspects along with the established principles of organization design and do the necessary changes so that we will get the team which breeds excellence and will allow us to sustain it over long period. These are;  

FOCUS: Every team needs a focus and the focus is typically provided by the leader of the team e.g. Project Manager provides focus to Project team and CEO provides focus to the organization. When the leader provides this focus, which ultimately translates in to goals of the members at various levels, “excellence” should be part of the same. Excellence is not a onetime activity but a continuous process; the messaging as well as expectations should clearly demonstrate the same. This focus really gets translated in to desired results if the focus of individuals matches with that of the leader. If the Team focus and Individual focus is different, then the results get diluted significantly. Hence it is critical for leaders to clearly state their focus towards excellence and demonstrate the same through their actions. It is also important to have interactions with the team at various levels regularly to check on the focus at various levels and make efforts to get as cohesive focus as possible.

FRAMEWORK: Best way to demonstrate the FOCUS is through framework which will be used by the team. So build a framework in such a manner that FOCUS is clearly visible to the team, through goals, objectives, mechanism of reporting & monitoring, metrics that would be used, etc. Create benchmarks for excellence levels in different areas of work; create incentives for achieving higher levels of excellence than benchmarks. The framework helps converting focus in to reality and is defined at two levels. First at level where, you define strategies or thoughts or policies or philosophies and the second at operations level where, you define actual procedures, approval mechanism, etc. It is critical to ensure that all the excellence tenets are included in definition of the FRAMEWORK that needs to be used to operate the organization and they are respected by everyone from top to bottom. One important part of FRAMEWORK is mechanism for reward and recognition; this is one of the critical point in terms of providing a push for “excellence behavior” seen in the associates. We need to craft this mechanism diligently in order to nurture excellence.

FLEXIBILITY: Flexibility is critical for breeding and nurturing Excellence. If the organization does not allow flexibility, it will not allow experimenting new ways to do things, it will not allow people to think out of the box, it will not allow people to fail and rise, it will not allow people to do better than what has been prescribed by the framework. The organization becomes rigid and does not encourage self-improvement. So the Framework when designed, we need to keep in mind that we do create it in such a manner that we encourage experimentation, we encourage associates to think differently and improve their level of excellence.   

   

FAITH: In the organization theory, it mentions of X & Y type of associates and various organizations are designed around the belief of management in the workforce attitude i.e. whether they believe the work force is predominantly X type or predominantly Y type. I believe that we need to set up the organization with a faith that associates really strive for excellence. With this FAITH in the team, we build our frameworks, and then chances are there that we will be able to create minimum hindrance organization. Off course, there will be exceptions and we will need to deal with them but we cannot strangulate the openness as well as flexibility which is built in the framework to foster Excellence Behavior for the sake of exceptions.

FUTURISTIC: Any organization when designed or any team which is formed is formed by keeping future in mind. The leaders predict the needs or the organization based on their vision for future and assessment of the current. The type of excellence traits that will be needed in near future as well as distant future needs to be identified and translated in to creating framework for the organization.

These five factors can be deliberated in much more detailed manner however it is clear that all the five factors are pretty interlinked and needs to be balanced on continuous basis. It becomes easy for the organization to implement these things if they have flexible IT systems supporting the framework. The robust IT backbone provides impetus to leaders to implement and demonstrate what they preach and it becomes transparent for the team that “excellence behavior” is recognized. The perpetual positive cycle of excellence sets in.