Organizational excellence gets used as a slogan, which is a shame, because underneath the word there are a few real principles you can install. I have spent years turning those principles into working tools for businesses, nonprofits, and associations. The leaders who get there are not chasing inspiration. They are building systems and requiring their use.
What is organizational excellence?
Organizational excellence is the ability to deliver consistently strong results across the whole organization, not just in the parts the owner personally touches. It shows up as visibility, accountability, and follow-through that hold whether or not the founder is in the building. The principles below are how you get there.
Principle one: your people are the asset, treat them like it
The first principle is a mindset shift most leaders resist. When something is broken, the instinct is to blame the team. The truth is usually the opposite. The people are the potential. The missing piece is a system that lets them succeed.
A leader will tell me his people are his problem, and I correct him right away. I say your people are your potential. Michael S. Kramer
What good looks like: employees have a real voice, see their ideas acted on, and get recognized for it. Where it goes wrong: leaders look for better people instead of better systems, and keep getting the same results with new faces.
Principle two: capture reality before you manage it
You cannot run an excellent organization on a version of reality that lives in the owner's head. You need to capture what is actually happening from the people closest to the work, the moment it happens, and respond to it. In ManageHub this is Suggest-Hub. The discipline is to act on what you capture, every time, or people stop telling you.
Principle three: decide in the open and execute in a rhythm
Excellence requires a disciplined way to make decisions, so the loudest voice does not win and the same issue is not relitigated every month. It also requires a weekly rhythm where progress, blockers, and next steps are reported and the exceptions get the attention. Capture, decide, execute. That loop, run consistently, is what separates excellent organizations from busy ones.
The business case worksheet is structured brainstorming. It creates the winning way of making decisions, so the leader isn't in an ivory tower making decisions the team has to implement. Michael S. Kramer
Principle four: it is a standard, and it is practical
These principles are not my invention. They come from the Baldrige Excellence Framework, the U.S. standard of management excellence, created by an Act of Congress in 1987 and run by NIST.
Baldrige Award winners have historically outperformed the S&P 500 by roughly four to one. Excellence is not theoretical. It is a set of processes you install one at a time, and keep improving as a living document.
Grade your organization against the standard.
The free 60-minute diagnostic benchmarks you against the 33 processes of America's best-run organizations and shows which principles are already in place and which are missing. No pitch, just a clear read.
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