An Excellence Agenda Fundamentals

An Excellence Agenda is based on the following fundamentals;

1. Excellence starts with individuals.  Every individual possesses unique talents and abilities that allow them to be excellent.  Every individual has a desire to matter to others because of those unique talents and abilities.  That results in a personal Excellence Agenda - an approach to how we are going to express our excellence and matter to the world.  However, each of us has areas of unexcellence and we therefore seek out other individuals who can balance us and give us excellence in all areas of our lives.   That leads to...
2. Communities of excellence.   A community is a group of people with an affinity or bond.  The affinity can be demographic, psychographic or utility based.   A demographic affinity could be a bond based on geographic location, family, professional interests, education, age, income etc.  A psychographic affinity is based on how we see ourselves and our self image.  We will associate with others who have a similar sense of attitudes, outlooks and values.  A utility based affinity or bond is when people create a community of a common sense of value delivered to the members.  A community of software users for instance may have a spectrum of demographics or psychographics, but they all share in the value delivered by the software.  Each of us belongs to a variety of communities of excellence, including our families, our workplaces, our clubs and even community and religious organizations. (For the balance of this posting we will look at communities of excellence within an organizational framework.  We will come back to individual Excellence Agendas in another post.)
3. Every community of excellence has an Excellence Agenda.  This excellence agenda sets out what the community aspirations are, and how it will strive to meet those aspirations.  At an organizational level the Excellence Agenda is often articulated in the Vision, Mission and Goals statements.  These represent the highest outcomes of the organization and managers work to develop a community of excellence that contribute to those outcomes.  Since Excellence is an outcome:  it is not something that is ever fully achieved.  You do not get to a place where you can say; "we have reached excellence, what's next!".  An Excellence Agenda is an ongoing journey and each agenda is unique to each organization.   
4. Every Excellence Agenda has two sub-agendas:  the Sustaining Agenda and the Change Agenda.  The Sustaining Agenda refers to the "meat and potatoes" of what a community does.  These are the day to day activities and outputs that contribute to the outcomes.  This is also known as "the work" that gets done.  The Sustaining Agenda is guided by the Mission of the organization.  The Change Agenda refers to the activities and outputs that will enhance An Excellence Agenda and take the organization to a higher level of excellence.  The Excellence Agenda is guided by the Vision.  The Change Agenda is typically a series of projects that could be related to infrastructure, building new knowledge, research and development, new product launches, new marketing initiatives etc.  The Change Agenda will eventually become the Sustainability Agenda as the Change gets embedded into every day operations.  (Thanks to John Harrison and BMB Consulting for the concept of Sustaining and Change Agendas)
5. So how do you know if your Excellence Agenda is working?  For that you need a Performance Measurement Framework (PMF).  The PMF is a tool that allows you to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) that give you feedback on your progress in contributing to the outcomes, including Excellence, the organization desires.  There can be KPI's for both the Sustaining and the Change Agendas.  In working with PMF's and KPI's for a number of years, the key lessons learned are: what gets measured gets done, gets alignment and gets funded.  An Excellence Agenda without a PMF is only marketing.  An Excellence Agenda with an active PMF is an unstoppable force to be reckoned with. 
6. But we are not Excellent everywhere or consistently.  We need to be able to manage an Excellence Agenda. Managing an Excellence Agenda means managing the Gaps.  The Gaps are the areas where reality and expectations do not meet.  One of the paradoxes of managing an Excellence Agenda, is that we will always have Excellence gaps.  It is part of the journey.  As discussed above, we never actually achieve Excellence - we contribute to it.  We will discuss managing gaps in greater detail in a future posting.  
7. The role of Executives and Managers is to create environments in which an Excellence Agenda can be delivered.  This includes financial excellence, product or service excellence, customer excellence etc.  An Excellence Agenda has multiple facets and dimensions.  An Excellence Agenda can include outcomes of profitability, environmental sustainability, service standards, the development of social, cultural or intellectual capital.  In short, an Excellence Agenda can be as broad or as narrow as you require.  What an Excellence Agenda does is focus attention on what is important - what the key success factors are to contribute to the aspirations of the organization.

Stay tuned, there is more to come on all of these ideas.