Tom Peters on Excellence

No discussion of Excellence can ignore the profound influence of Tom Peters.  In Search of Excellence, A Passion for Excellence and Thriving on Chaos are fascinating, detailed examinations of what works.  In chapter 1 of A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters describes the four principles he believes are at the core of Excellence. They are:

• Care of Customers
• Constant Innovation
• People 
• Leadership through Managing by Wandering Around.

His key theme is that Excellence is simple, not easy, but simple. The paradox is that you have to do all of these things with a single minded dedication to doing well.  This quote struck home with me again as I reread it:

"I turns out that neither superior customer service nor constant innovation - the two sustaining edges of excellence - is built upon genius in the executive suite, sleight-of-hand techniques or mystical strategic moves on a game board that allow one to gain a five or ten year advantage over one's competitors.  Both are built, instead, on a bedrock of listening, trust and respect for the dignity and creative potential of each person in the organization."  (Page 579, Tom Peters Two Complete Books, Wings Books, (c) 1995)

As Tom Peters so eloquently points out, Excellence is about people, creating communities of excellence through listening, respect and giving people the space to be innovative and creative.  I don't think the world has changed all that much.  I think we have forgotten the basics of Excellence. We have to get back to the fact that business is about people; looking after our customers, our suppliers, our team.  Leadership is about listening, trusting and building respect.  Imagine that. Leading by listening - really listening, not just to the words, but to the meaning, and the intention of the conversation.  The problem I see in organizations every day is that everyone is so busy talking, (through emails, text messages, and meetings) that no one has the time to listen. 

Excellence Agenda Interview

This past Monday morning I had a call from a colleague, David Cohen  inviting me to guest on a one hour teleclass scheduled for Wednesday evening.  It seems his planned guest had been in a bicycle accident and was unavailable and he needed a replacement in a hurry!  David really liked the Excellence Agenda concept and thought it would be great for the class.  This teleclass is offered by Alterna Credit Union  as a way of reaching out to their small business and entrepreneur clients.  The class offers an opportunity to connect with peers, get some one on one coaching on a topic that can help their business.  So Wednesday night we did the one hour teleclass.

It was really great.  Firstly, David, is a great host.  He makes his guests, me included, feel comfortable and his questions let you explore ideas and get into a conversation.  Alterna makes it easy for their clients to connect using a toll free teleconferencing system.  The participants asked great questions and we really got into the discussion. I was sorry to see the hour come to an end. One of the great lessons that I got from the discussion is that An Excellence Agenda works for all sizes of businesses, from one person self employed entrepreneurs, to mature organizations.  It was wonderful to hear people take the concept and run with it. 

Congratulations to both Alterna and David for making this happen.  Check out David's site for his weekly radio show Small Business, Big Ideas.  I will be interviewed on the show in January on the Excellence Agenda concept and will post the link here.  Check out Alterna for their unique focus on building and promoting small business and entrepreneurship. 

The Artistic Director

Deep in my past I was a classically trained musician. I played oboe, the instrument that Samuel Pepys called, " an ill wind that nobody blows good". I played in both orchestras and chamber ensembles. I much preferred chamber music because each player is one to a part, yet you are part of a whole. I moved on into arts management and worked with symphony orchestras and ballet training school.

One of the unique aspects of arts organizations is that they are structured differently from other businesses.  They have an artistic director. The role of the artistic director is to cultivate the Excellence Agenda for the company. They are intimately involved with both the Vision/Change Agenda and the Mission/Sustaining Agenda of the organization. The Artistic Director is, in fact, the Champion of the Excellence Agenda. The company is only as good at its ability to perform to the level of the Excellence Agenda. Every performance is unique, some are better than others, all of them may be excellent!

The role of management, in this structure, is to create the environment in which the Excellence Agenda can be deployed.

There is a similar structure in film production. The Director is the keeper of the vision or whole concept of what the film will be.  The actors and the production team work to support that vision.

In sharing the concept of the Excellence Agenda with colleagues, it has occurred to me that we need to look at our organization with an Artistic Director lens. Who in your organization is the keeper of the Vision and the Mission? How well is that Vision/Mission articulated or shared? How well understood is it by the rest of the production team? Look around this week and identify the Champion of the Excellence Agenda in your organization. If you can't find one, maybe you have a gap that needs addressing.

Managing the Gap

"Ordinary people are capable of acommplishing extraordinary things."  

Barack Obama

After reviewing the concepts of An Excellence Agenda with one of my clients, she said;  "Francis, this is all great, but we are not excellent."  What my wonderful client was missing was the concept of The Gap.   The Gap is one of the basic tools for managing An Excellence Agenda.

If you have ever been frustrated, anxious, worried, angry or upset, it is probably because you are experiencing a Gap in your life.  The Gap is the difference between your expectations and your performance.  The greater the gap between your expectations and performance, the higher the level of frustration, anxiety etc.  Motivation comes when the Gap is very small - we then feel that with some additional effort, we can meet our expectations, and our performance and expectations will be aligned.

Gaps are built into our system as human beings.  We cannot get rid of the gaps, we can only manage them.   In managing An Excellence Agenda, we need to manage the gaps between our expectation:  what we believe Excellence is and the performance we see in front of us.  

There are three ways to manage the gap:

• lower our expectations
• raise the level of performance
• let go of our expectations - and work with the performance only

Lowering our expectations

  

This is often called compromise or making do, which many people resist.  There is, however, another side to this.  In a series of interviews with business leaders, virtually every business leader felt that that they were above average in abilities, decision making and accomplishments.  Our natural self regard puts us in a high achievement category.  We are, each of us, legends in our own minds.  The problem is that it isn't true, all of us are excellent in a several areas, average in others and downright dangerous in others.  Don't ask me to do brain surgery !  

One of the key ways we frustrate people as colleagues, managers and leaders, is that we believe that our personal performance is close to 100%, and we expect those around us to be at a similar level.  After all, if we can do it, so can they.  Our actual performance is actually probably closer to 80 - 90%. If we lower our personal expectation to 85% and set our acceptable performance standards at 75% we will see a huge positive impact on both ourselves and those in communities of excellence around us.  One of the keys to promoting environments in which excellence can happen is to lower our expectation levels slightly, and then celebrate like heck when those around us perform at levels that are more average.  

The result of the positive feedback is that those communities of excellence will start to perform at higher and higher levels and the accomplishment cycle goes through the roof.  

It's worth a try.

Raising performance

See note above.

Eliminating Expectations

There is another way to build excellence capacity.  That is to let go of expectations.  In Eastern Philosophy, this is seen as a key way to achieve a sense of peace and accomplishment.  By letting go of expectations, you eliminate the Gap and can free yourself up to enjoy what you are doing right now - today's current performance.  In this way you give yourself permission to be as excellent today as you can be.  Some days are really high performance days, other days are less high performance days.  The key is to let go and let excellence emerge. 

If we truly believe that everyone in our COEs, comes to the table desiring to be excellent, then we can let go and let each of them be excellent.  Where performance is suffering, then we need to understand the gap in the performance (resources, capacity, expectations, other blocks) and either accept them, or eliminate them.  Sometimes our expectations cannot be fulfilled because the environment just will not allow it.  Letting go is the only solution.

I decided several years ago that I no longer have problems in my life - only Gaps.  What gaps are you experiencing today?  Are you willing to lower your expectation?  Can you enhance performance?  What would happen if you lived in the moment and let the expectation go?

In managing An Excellence Agenda if we look at managing the Gaps, we get to let people around us be excellent in their own way.  The result is enhanced Communities of Excellence and unbelievable performance.

Seth Godin on The Forever Recession and the Coming Revolution

On his blog this morning Seth Godin posted this commentary on the Recession and the new world:

The Forever Recession

The concept of an Excellence Agenda and promoting/fostering Communities of Excellence, are part of the coming revolution.  Communities of Excellence can be the platform for "impromptu innovation and inspiration that involves connections between and among people."  And yes it is totally unlike factory work.  I believe that to succeed in this new world, an Excellence Agenda and fostering Communities of Excellence are vital.  The future is based on an ability to leverage you own personal excellence in environments that promotes creativity, innovation, experimentation and growth.  Computers, the Internet and software give us the tools that can leverage our creativity and distribute excellence in a real time world.  As Seth Godin suggests, this is a world of collaboration, not competition.  It is a world of multiple connections to different Communities of Excellence for different projects, gigs or creations.

Not a bad place to be at all.

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.

Megan's Story

On Friday of last week, I needed to get a few grocery items and stopped in at our local Metro supermarket.  This supermarket is a typical suburban food store.  This is not a superstore or big box, but a standard food market with a great deli, in-house bakery and a great selection of produce.  It serves a local community of about 45,000 people in a community that is typically a blue collar type of crowd.

I checked out with my debit card and asked for some cash back.  I left the store and about a half hour later when looking to complete another purchase discovered I had no cash.

When I got home, I looked at the receipt from the Metro store.  I had not signed for any cash back - so probably the cashier and I had both missed it.  (An over 50 moment for me!)  I called the telephone number on the receipt and within two rings I heard;  "Hello Metro, Meagan speaking."  Wow, a real person answers the telephone without going through a prompt system.  I explained the situation and Megan said, no problem that when the reconciliation was done in the evening they could give me a call back.  I thought that would be ok, and then said I had the time and the transaction code on the receipt.  "Oh," said Megan, " I can look that up on our computer, just a moment."  In literally a few seconds, she had identified my purchase and told me what I had bought.  "The cashier is right beside me," she said, " if you don't mind waiting a few moments we can do a quick cash check."  In less than a minute she was back on the line with the news that the cash was over by exactly the amount I had requested.  We arranged for me to pick up the money the next morning.

Early Saturday morning I went in to get my money and met Megan face to face.  I was so impressed with the service - I wanted to know the source of the Excellence Agenda.  I wanted to know what had triggered her response to help me.  She said it was when I told her that I had not signed for the money and could give her the time and transaction code that she realized I was telling her the truth.  From that it was just a question of checking the computer.  But it was much more than that.

There are not one, but two Excellence Agendas here. It seems, this Metro store has an Excellence Agenda based on competing not just on prices and product selection, but also on exceptional and personal customer service.

Megan has her own Excellence Agenda.  Megan is in her mid-20`s and has worked at the store for more than 10 years - it`s the only job she has had.  She has a degree in Psychology and has an honest interest in making people happy.  She gets her people approach from her parents and upbringing and it is supported by the `family atmosphere`of the staff.  This store has a staff of over 100 - some family!

The fact that Megan has worked in the store for 10 years and really enjoys her job, tells me that she is not only working in a Community of Excellence, but that management has created a Culture of Excellence.

Megan explained that the computer used to be on the second floor and when there were customer enquires at the customer service station, someone would have to go upstairs.  So what did management do?  They installed a terminal beside the telephone so that she can look up information while she is on the telephone.   In other words, the corporate Excellence Agenda is supported by IM/IT systems that give the staff the ability to respond to enquiries in real time.  Megan is also given the freedom to make customer satisfaction decisions without having to go to senior management all of the time.  There is a belief that the customer is, for the most part, honest and trustful.  That creates a culture of trust within the store to serve with authenticity and credibility.

Congratulations to the Management and Staff of Metro store 257.  You are a wonderful example of An Excellence Agenda and the power of Communities of Excellence.

By the way, after talking with Megan, I went in to buy BBQ supplies and spent virtually all of the cash back.  An Agenda of Excellence pays rewards.

Communities of Excellence

One of the foundations of promoting an Excellence Agenda is recognizing the need to foster Communities of Excellence.  I will define Communities of Excellence in greater detail in later postings to the blog - but let me give you an example of a Community of Excellence in action.

Last weekend was the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  As the airways over North America closed, transatlantic flights were redirected to smaller centres on the East Coast of Canada.   I was pleased to hear interviews with the Mayor of Gander, Newfoundland on how their community of 10,000 responded to the 6600 guests they had sent to them. Given only a few hours notice, the Mayor appealed to the community for help, everything was needed; bed clothes and linens, food for the emergency shelters, volunteers to help greet and register the guests, set up for telephones and email.  It was a monumental task, but this community came together and made it happen.  They even hosted a good-bye party for the guests before they left.

In interviews with some of the guests, who returned for the 10th anniversary gathering, they talked about the hospitality, the warmth and generosity.  They talked of making lifelong friendships.  Gander is now twinned with other communities because of what they did that day.  The Mayor talked about how important it was to make sure that the right people were put in the right volunteer places to make sure that it all worked. Everyone pitched in with their unique abilities and their own contribution to creating a Community of Excellence.

I lived through the Ice Storm of January 2008.  From that experience, I learned how resilient and adaptable communities really are.  How communities can actively learn from each other, share information and ensure that everyone gets taken care of.  In my work in community consultation and engagement, I have always marvelled at the level of talent, creativity and innovation there exists wherever I go.  The same goes for the organizations and businesses I have worked with.  People want to be associated with a Community of Excellence.  The challenge for leaders at all levels is to help create environments in which people feel that they are a part of a Community of Excellence.

Today, look at the communities that you belong to.  Which ones do you feel a sense of excellence and connection to?  Why is that, and what have you done to contribute to the sense of excellence?

Excellence is all around us - we just need to stop for a moment and see it for what it really is.