We’ve become marathoners at running after so many differentiators in the world of business. Service excellence, customer experience, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, contactless transactions and the list goes on and on. These differentiators are considered to be game changers and rightly so. They do bring massive value to a business when they are deployed effectively. But, what about excellence as the original differentiator?
Shouldn’t excellence be pursued as the grounding differentiator that establishes the operational baseline for a business? The argument here being that if all leaders are tasked with ensuring that their strategic business units are held accountable for a one hundred percent efficiency and operational excellence rating, then the massive ball dropping that occurs frequently, will disappear.
This will establish a clear expanse for the business to focus on innovation and growth, rather than be consumed with outing fires and fixing issues that should not have occurred in the first place. Now, don’t get me wrong, issues that fall within the orbit of critical success factors should be addressed and resolved. These would include culture rebalancing, vision resetting, digital re-engineering and the range of technical interventions needed to strengthen strategic business units. It’s just that the preventative prescription should override the curative one.
When leaders of businesses that are undertaking transformational journeys adopt a non-negotiable stance on “doing things well,” the upward shifts last longer.
The process of unveiling excellence can be one that’s long and arduous, or quick and dirty. It all depends on the depth of the fault lines.
Of course, any redemptive effort has to begin with a leadership edict. In my work as a service transformation consultant, the evidence shows that when leaders of businesses that are undertaking transformational journeys adopt a non-negotiable stance on “doing things well,” the upward shifts last longer.
My experience has been as well, that some businesses do not invest sufficiently in the deep, authentic and soul-stirring work that is needed at the top of the employee food chain. Transformative work at the leadership level of a business requires significant and sustained investment, just to enable leaders to win at the point where people and business intersect. Leaders tend to be over-stacked on the business focus end and under-stacked on the people centric end. This, of course, is old news.
Unveiling excellence means paying attention to what I consider to be a silent pandemic that is materializing in businesses. The fear of the future. Barack Obama, the forty fourth president of the USA put it very eloquently when he said, “We are here to shape the future, not to fear it.”
What does reuniting with excellence mean? It means becoming fascinated with having a passion for doing things well.
As humans, we are programmed to expect catastrophe. Our minds are wired to expect the negative before the positive. As more and more of our leaders begin to understand the endemic nature of fear as being rooted in a sort of universal genetic coding, they may begin to embrace a more layered approach to neutralizing its existence.
When a workplace is saturated with a sense of fear, the mindset of employees is a lever for low performance and even lower productivity. Individuals lose their sense of curiousity and their appetite for experiential adventure. They begin to colour inside the box, suffocating excellence.
For any business that has found itself in this state of affairs, unveiling excellence has to become an urgent and intentional goal. My concern is whether or not the phenomenon would have captured the attention of leaders, strongly enough to drive purposeful action.
So really, for a business that is planning to elevate itself as an admired brand, what does reuniting with excellence mean?
Reuniting with excellence means setting aside the superfluous overtures that happen in teambuilding sessions and getting down to the real work of being respectful towards every individual, regardless of status or pay grade.
It means becoming fascinated with having a passion for doing things well. To this business, every thought, word, deed and task will be imprinted with a grade one quality. The business will boast an “oxygen-rich” workspace where like-minded people, who abhor unvarnished behaviours, thrive.
Unvarnished behaviours include egoism, extreme selfishness (we’re all selfish to some extent), ill-will, glorification of workaholism, feigned friendliness, unrealized promises to staff.
Oh….and I have to include my all-time favourite. It’s when a junior employee makes a request of a manager and the latter says, “Remind me.” I consider this to be an extremely disrespectful act. In effect, the manager is saying to the employee that what you just requested is not important enough to be committed to my memory. It’s a horrible signal to send to someone.
Unveiling excellence means behaving in an authentically human way on the inside of a business, so that the varnished branding being projected on the outside, is, in fact, authentic.
Reuniting with excellence means setting aside the superfluous overtures that happen in teambuilding sessions and getting down to the real work of being respectful towards every individual, regardless of status or pay grade.
Above all, unveiling excellence means behaving in an authentically human way on the inside of a business, so that the varnished branding being projected on the outside, is, in fact, authentic.