Every company strives for organizational excellence. Not every company achieves it. To obtain organizational excellence, you need to understand the various roadblocks that stand your way. You also have to develop the right mindset to steer past them.
The Importance of Organizational Excellence
Organization excellence depends on three key components:
- A vision that empowers and inspires employees. This is where you want to be. Focusing on your goal will help you get ahead.
- A mission that focuses on getting the right things done. This is your map. It shows you the path you need to take and helps you avoid wrong turns.
- Values that lead to organizational health, team effectiveness, and continuous improvement. This is your vehicle. If it’s not properly maintained, everything will break down.
When the three elements are exactly where they should be, your organization is in the fast lane for success and growth – but there are many bumps in the road that you need to avoid.
The Roadblocks in Your Way
It’s easy to take a wrong turn. You might not even notice for a while, not until you look around and realize you’re not where you expected to be.
One common problem is a lack of alignment. Just like the tires on your car, your goals, objectives, and key results need to be properly aligned.
Take your vision. It’s what guides your company towards a destination. So, what happens when the company’s financial goals, department objectives, team objectives and individual objectives don’t reflect the vision? This lack of alignment means you’re not actually being driven by your vision—and there’s a good chance you won’t achieve that vision.
To obtain organizational excellence, you need everything to align, from your organization’s overarching purpose to the daily actions of each individual employee.
Looking from Many Perspectives
When you are focused on the road ahead, it’s easy to get tunnel vision, but organizational excellence requires attention to many different perspectives at once:
- Financial Perspective – Is the bottom line healthy?
- Customer Perspective – Are the customers happy?
- Internal Business Processes Perspective – Are the operations effective as well as efficient?
- Learning and Growth Perspective – Are the employees thriving?
If you let yourself lose sight of any one of these perspectives, your organization could find itself lost along the way or even worse in a dead end.
The Journey Never Ends
The vision can be likened to your company’s destination, but the truth is that you’ll never get there. It’s more like the horizon – it keeps shifting forward.
Organizational excellence is a continuous improvement journey that never ends but rather focuses the company on reaching new destinations along the way If you approach it as a one-and-done project, you’ve already lost your way.
Think about it this way: A new car should have great alignment. Then it hits a few bumps and curbs. Maybe there is a fender bender. The alignment gets out of whack, and it needs to be fixed. The same thing will happen with your company. You might have everything aligned now, but the ups and downs of daily operations have a way of changing things.
Problems might lead you to adopt a “firefighting” mentality where you are constantly putting out fires. Or you might have to revisit the same problem again and again because you have not addressed the root issue. Or maybe you give up and decide not to improve at all. There are many ways to make a wrong turn.
To avoid these pitfalls, you need to constantly reassess and readjust. It’s an ongoing effort, but it’s one that will pay off with better processes, more engaged employees, happier customers and measurable results.
