Organizational excellence is a framework for aligning your people and organization to execute the company’s vision and mission. It provides a platform for ensuring you have the right vision for yourself as a leader and for your organization as a whole, along with the right mission, strategy, structure, and staff with matching skill sets in place to execute that vision and mission each day.
Organizational excellence creates the system, processes, and tools for tangibly implementing these items in your organization.
At Lushin, we use the organizational excellence framework to help our clients define, clarify, align, and develop the vision, mission, goals, strategies, tactics, and tools to implement these items now and into the future. We help you work these items into conversations with your people and into day-to-day operations, to ensure that the right processes and tools are in place for the organization to continue to grow in the right direction.
Laying a Foundation for Growth
There are many reasons why organizational excellence is helpful to a company. Too many organizations take off and grow fast at the start, but never properly structure their business for growth or lay the foundation for taking the business in the direction they intend it to go.
Leaders in this position often try to put these foundational pieces into place after they’ve seen that initial growth, but then run into problems creating these items or managing change after the fact.
For example, suppose an organization does not have a clear vision and mission. They may find that their people come up with their own ideas of what these are, and the team may head in all different directions, rather than aligning around and working toward the same goals.
Building a Structure for Organizational Excellence
Without the right structure and process pieces in place, it becomes challenging for an organization to replicate its work and service on a consistent basis.
As people leave the organization, the knowledge of customer details—like how processes and tools work and how they’re applied—goes out the door with them, making it hard to provide consistent service to customers. This leads to customer problems, complaints, and churn on a regular basis, putting leadership in constant fire-fighting mode.
If the organization has not planned for future growth or doesn’t know which positions and people are needed, it will tend to recruit new people out of desperation, which can lead to higher levels of staff turnover or too much responsibility and requirements being placed on key people, leading to frustration and burnout.
The organizational excellence framework helps leaders instead recruit from a place of clarity, in which they’re able to find the best person for each position to help take the organization to the next level.
Organizational Excellence FAQs
Do you use the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)?
No, the organizational excellence framework is not EOS and is not what Lushin does. Our model is about working with leaders and their teams to put in place the systems, processes, and tools their unique business needs for predictable growth.
How do we get our people motivated and aligned around our company’s vision and mission?
A clear vision and mission are the foundation for organizational excellence. In order to get your people aligned on the vision and mission of your company, you must first get clarity as a leader on what they truly are and why they’re the right ones for the company.
You can’t expect your people to rally behind the cause if you’re not clear on what that cause is and why you’re chasing after it. Once these definitions are in place, the next thing to do is meet with your people and help them figure out how supporting the vision and mission can directly impact and help them.
People are motivated to take action and make changes for their own reasons, not yours.
How do we know if we have the right people in the right seats? What positions will we need as we take our company to the next level?
To answer this question, you’ll first have you ask yourself these questions:
- What does the next phase or level of our company look like?
- What new positions/roles will be created because of this?
- Who on the current team could fill those roles?
- Which roles will we still need to fill?
Once you have clarity on these items, take an inventory of your current team and see where there are gaps in positions that need to be filled for the future company to achieve organizational excellence.
From there, develop an action plan and timeline to begin recruiting for those future roles.
What metrics and KPIs should we be tracking to ensure we’re running the company effectively?
The KPIs and metrics that your company should be tracking are going to be slightly different for each business and industry. Ideally, there will be leading indicators (e.g., new meetings for potential business, new opportunities for potential business, new marketing leads, etc.) that drive the growth of the business, as well as lagging indicators (e.g., revenue in, new opportunities won, cash flow, etc.) that help us to see how we’re performing to the company goals.
The important thing is that your business strives for organizational excellence with clearly defined metrics and KPIs, and is tracking the items that you want to continually improve over time.
