Excellence and commnication

I was talking to an old friend on the weekend.  This friend has been very successful in an international career and is now leading a major regional cultural centre.  The centre receives funding from a local regional government and as part of the renewed funding arrangement, a review was conducted.  One of the problems is that the tool being used to conduct the review is designed for social and community programs, not cultural programs.  The criteria and the scoring of the criteria is skewed towards social outcomes.  The results of the review did not reflect the mandate or the actual impact the centre has had on it's audience.

The real problem is that the tool is mandatory, and contributes to funding and resource decisions.  The centre is faced with a dilemma.  How does it tell it's story to a funder who is using a skewed assessment tool.  The real dilemma is that the cultural centre measures it's impact on cultural excellence criteria and the local government is measuring excellence based on social impact and there is no translation available.

If we are going to promote excellence in our organization, we need to understand what "excellence" means and it may have different meanings.  The goal of management is to be able to communicate what excellence is - there needs to be a performance measurement system in place that reinforces excellence and promotes aligned responses.  That does not mean that every program or department has to have the same definition, but it does mean that there has to be communication between managers and executives to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  Whatever framework you use to communicate - it must be one that everyone understands.