An organisation becomes “excellent” when its management, operations, strategy and culture all align.
With this foundation in place, the organisation needs to execute its highest priorities flawlessly to deliver sustainable, high performance results.
We use a customised approach to help achieve organisational excellence, having said that, we have found through experience that the focus of the initial discovery discussions is generally in these four areas:
Leadership Team Cohesion
No organisation, large or small, can achieve “excellence” unless its leaders are behaviourally cohesive. Dysfunction at the top inevitably leads to silos and division throughout the entire organisation.
Organisational Clarity
The leadership team needs to be in lock-step agreement on some critical organisational issues. Purpose, values, strategy, priorities, roles and responsibilities, must be discussed, agreed and committed to, in order for any organisation to achieve excellence.
Organisational Communication
Once a leadership team has become cohesive and worked to establish clarity, they must communicate the key values, strategies and priorities over and over again, at individual, team and organisational levels. Failure to do so often means that progress grinds to a halt.
People Processes
Unless the systems and processes within an organisation reinforce the direction and strategy set by the leadership team, then the systems themselves start to dominate and take the emphasis away from the overall business goals.
Flawless Execution
Of course, even when an organisation is aligned, cohesive, communicating well and systems are working in line with business objectives, excellence doesn’t automatically follow. In order for that to happen, its people must be empowered to execute flawlessly.
The degree to which the above areas need “fixing” naturally depends greatly on the organisation and leadership team in question.
Typical engagements are for a minimum of 12 months and often much longer; we know that old habits die hard and it helps to have an outside eye reminding people of what they have learnt and committed to changing. Excellence is an ongoing commitment!
