You can use an organizational excellence process to achieve what your mission statement calls for
An Organizational
Excellence Process
The concept of organizational excellence provides a powerful way to implement your mission statement and achieve its objectives. A typical mission statement summarizes core beliefs and values, some of which are people-oriented and some, business-related. Mission statements are commonly treated as ideals, encased in glass and rarely acted upon specifically or directly. Because of this missing linkage, they are often regarded as corporate window-dressing. They can be much more.
Mission as an Organizational Excellence Definition
A well-constructed mission statement touches upon everything that is valued highly by the organization. It concisely describes basic strategy as well as aspirations about treating people fairly, leadership qualities and similar values. In fact, if your mission statement doesn't reflect your organization's top-level strategic goals, then one or other is defective.
Because a proper definition of organizational excellence is based on these same values, the mission statement can provide a great starting point. All you need to add are specifics that make your definition measurable.
Let us look at a process for making a mission statement operational using our organizational excellence process:
1. Define Organizational Excellence
The first step is to decide on what aspects of your business and people you want to include in your definition. If you have a mission statement, you should start by extracting the values and objectives that it contains. If not, then you need to start from scratch. See our commentary on Organizational Excellence for some ideas.
Mission statements often contain vague goals like "treating our employees fairly", "providing our customers with maximum value", and "delivering superior products". While these may well be valid and strongly-held values, they are a long way from being measurable. You have to decide exactly what defines "fairly" in dealing with employees, or "maximum value" for customers, or "superior" for products. This, as you might imagine, can generate a good deal of discussion and bring out many contradictory points of view but, in the end, a consensus is necessary.
Your output from this step should be a clear picture of what your organization values most, described in terms that allow measurement. The importance of being measurable cannot be overstated: If you can't measure it, you will never achieve it.
2. Establish a Baseline
The next step is to figure out where you are on each aspect of your excellence definition. If your definition includes profitability, then this step is easy. If your definition includes something like "great people" or "strong leadership", then you probably have some work to do. Few organizations assess such qualities on a routine basis.
You may find that trying to assess where you are on each excellence aspect will cause you to re-think your excellence definition. Pursuing a "great people" value may, after assessing the most desirable qualities of your best people, decide to modify this value to something like "people we enjoy working with", "highly creative people" or "people who embody the highest standards of our profession". In fact, you may want to carry out such an assessment as part of the excellence definition step. Doing so will give you a sense for the practicality of measuring your values and a better understanding of alternatives. A good assessment may also identify important values that may be impacted by whatever you do to achieve target values.
Your output from this step should be a concrete assessment of where your organization stands on each aspect of your excellence definition (and mission).
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