Operational Excellence:
A Means to Fulfilling Your Mission
March 2006
Signs and symptoms which indicate that the vitality of your mission is in danger:
- You find that your people are spending too much time managing through the same crises again and again.
- Wasted activity and effort deplete time and energy from working on what really matters.
- People don't come prepared to meetings, so decisions are delayed.
- It's unclear who makes final decisions on new products, so they regularly come out late.
- It's unclear who plays what role in submitting proposals, so there's often a weekend of last minute work to contend with.
- Tension is growing among your hard working people and the enthusiasm for the "mission statement" is evaporating into apathy.
Over the years, the connection between fulfilling your inspiring mission and the necessity of operational excellence has been not well understood. The key ingredient that bridges today's activity to tomorrow's legacy: Leadership. There are a variety of programs like Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Management by Objectives, Quality Programs, Process Reengineering, and ISO Certification that are useful for bringing necessary structure to an organization's mission. Many variables contribute to the success of any operational excellence program, and one of the most misunderstood ingredients to any of these approaches is leadership.
The success of your leadership is dependent upon your willingness to take risks and initiate change that calls people to a higher accountability. Only a leader can clearly articulate the connection between today's tasks and the ultimate reason you're in business. Someone with vision has to be willing to say, "We must take time to document our best practices and no longer make it up as we go." It takes real perspective to determine what level of detail is useful in an operational excellence program and how much granularity is overkill. Someone with credibility must "hold the perspective of the whole" and mediate the special interests when one group is vying for an approach that doesn't serve the entire organization. These leaders articulate what results are critical from all of your core business processes. It's also the leader who understands the difference between a 'result' you can take to the bank and the activities and effort that most people focus on. And leaders insist that resources are provided to help put a comprehensive system like this in place. Last but not least, it's the leader who ensures that data is collected, reviewed in a problem solving as opposed to faultfinding manner, and that this work is woven into the ongoing management of the organization.
A wise leader understands two subtle reasons why this work is among the highest of your countless priorities:
- Passionate mission. This work is not about a silly set of rules and regulations that manage the minutia of running your business. It's not about 'paper flow'. Operational excellence systems allow your people to collaborate with best practices, reliability among one another, and optimum service to customers at your lowest cost. Your organization can literally work like a clock. This is a prerequisite to having the time, energy and focus to look outward toward your reason for existence: the mission statement you are inspired by. Instead of feeling frustrated with constant chaos, you will feel enlivened by the cause you are passionate about!
- Collaborative Accountability. If it's the leader's role to ensure all of the variables for success are in place, that's a lonely job; and not very sustainable. The leader who really stands for operational excellence has to develop these leadership characteristics in key people throughout the organization. Designing and successfully implementing a system of collaborative accountability is a powerful way to develop leaders at the next level. Once you set the expectation, and provide the expertise and resources needed, you will see who can rise to the occasion. It won't take long to discover who your 'partners' are and that's the measure of a real leader: developing other leaders.
Here is one success story in the making. In one of our client companies there were huge concerns about customer service and the fact that over 50% of their customers were not recommitting to their professional certification when it expired. With a 100% commitment to timely recertification letters and returning all incoming phone calls and emails within 24 hours, the recertification rate rose to 95% within a matter of months. Even more importantly, this improvement process helped the CEO discover who she could count on and who was no longer a fit for the organization. They are now gearing up to pursue their mission like never before!
If you'd like to explore our LionHeart approach to this work, please see Resource #7 Creating a System of Operational Excellence or call us at 503 632 8572 for a professional assessment of your opportunity!
Life is too short to solve the same problems over and over again.