Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Many organizations that describe themselves as excellent have actually become very good at producing competence consistently and at scale. Excellence begins when leaders are willing to examine the successful systems, assumptions and behaviours that may now be limiting the organization’s next level of performance.
People wildly overestimate how hard it is to be top 10% at something and wildly underestimate how hard it is to be top 1% at something.
Excellence appears in vision statements, corporate values, annual reports, leadership presentations and employee awards. It is used so frequently that it can become difficult to tell what the word means in practice—or whether the organization is pursuing excellence at all.
Many organizations may actually be pursuing competence at scale.
Competence at scale is not a small achievement. It means that the organization can produce an acceptable standard of performance repeatedly, across multiple people, teams, locations or customer interactions. It requires systems, processes, training, coordination, accountability and a reasonable degree of operational discipline.
An organization that achieves this will often outperform one that depends on individual heroics, informal knowledge and people remembering what to do.
Competence at scale creates consistency.
The customer receives roughly the same standard of service regardless of who is working. Decisions are made within established parameters. Employees understand their roles. Problems are addressed through recognizable processes. Leaders can monitor performance, compare results and intervene when something falls outside the expected range.
That organization may be considerably better than many of its competitors.
Being better than most is not necessarily the same as being excellent.
The journey from inconsistent performance to dependable competence is often more straightforward than people expect. Many organizations are operating with avoidable gaps: unclear responsibilities, weak follow-through, fragmented communication, poorly designed processes and standards that are either vague or inconsistently applied.
Addressing those gaps can produce significant improvement.
The results are visible:
Delays decrease. Errors decline. Customers complain less. Productivity improves. People become clearer about what is expected of them. The organization begins to function with greater order and predictability.
Leaders often conclude at this point, that the organization has achieved excellence. It may instead have become reliably competent.
The difference: competence can be standardized far more easily than excellence.
Standards can tell people what acceptable performance looks like. Processes can reduce unnecessary variation. Training can teach people how to handle familiar situations. Measures can show whether the organization is producing the expected result.
These mechanisms help an organization reproduce what it already knows how to do.
Excellence becomes more demanding because it requires the organization to recognize what its existing standards, processes and measures cannot see.
The closer an organization gets to excellence, the less obvious its remaining constraints may become.
Early problems are attention grabbing. Customers complain. Deadlines are missed. Costs rise. Work has to be redone. Employees are unclear about decisions. Leaders can see that something is not working, even when they disagree about why.
At higher levels of performance, the constraint may not look like a problem.
It may be a successful product that has made the organization reluctant to question its market assumptions. It may be a respected leader whose judgment has become too influential to challenge. It may be an efficient process that leaves no room for the exceptions carrying important information. It may be a strong culture that rewards belonging while discouraging dissent. It may be a performance measure that improves each year while the organization becomes less responsive to what is changing around it. None of these will necessarily appear on a dashboard as evidence of failure. In fact, they may be among the things the organization is proudest of.
What happens when the pursuit of excellence becomes uncomfortable?
The organization must examine not only what is failing, but what is working—and ask whether it is still serving the future it wants to create. This requires much more than just greater effort.
A competent organization can usually improve by doing familiar things better: strengthening execution, increasing accountability, refining processes or adding capability.
An organization pursuing excellence must also be prepared to discover that the next level cannot be reached through more disciplined repetition of the current one.
- The assumptions that produced success may now be limiting it.
- The structure that once created control may now be slowing decisions.
- The leader who once provided direction may now be preventing others from exercising judgment.
- The culture that once created cohesion may now be filtering out information the organization needs.
Why organizations plateau?
The plateau is not always evidence that people have become complacent or stopped working hard. Sometimes they are applying considerable effort within a way of operating that has reached the limit of what it can produce.
The organization responds by increasing targets, introducing new initiatives, changing personnel or demanding greater urgency. Performance may improve temporarily, but the underlying constraint remains untouched because it sits within the organization’s thinking about how success is created.
Competence at scale asks:
How do we get more people to perform consistently within the system we have built?
Excellence asks:
What is the system we have built preventing us from seeing, questioning or becoming?
That is a harder question because it places the organization itself under examination.
It also changes the role of leadership. Leaders are no longer responsible only for ensuring that people meet established standards. They must create the conditions in which the standards themselves can be questioned. They must be willing to hear information that disrupts the accepted explanation, exposes contradictions or challenges decisions with which they strongly identify.
An organization cannot learn beyond the limits of what its leadership is prepared to examine.
This is the point at which the distance between being very good and becoming exceptional widens.
It is not simply a difference in talent, ambition or effort. It is a difference in what the organization is willing to confront after the obvious problems have been solved and the familiar improvements have already been made.
Competence allows an organization to perform well within what it knows. Excellence requires it to remain curious about what it does not know—including what its success may be preventing it from seeing.
Before declaring excellence as an organizational value, leaders may need to ask a more honest question:
Are we genuinely pursuing excellence—or have we become very good at reproducing competence?
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Think about an area in which your organization consistently performs well.
What systems, processes and behaviours make that performance repeatable? What has that consistency caused you to regard as evidence of excellence?
Now look beyond the current standard. What assumptions, leadership behaviours, measures, structures or established ways of working are no longer being questioned because they have contributed to the organization’s success?
If greater effort within the current system will only produce more of the same, what might the organization need to examine—or be willing to disturb—to reach its next level of performance?
About Giselle
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with leaders across the Caribbean facing problems that keep returning, solutions that haven’t delivered the expected results, or changes that prove difficult to implement.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.”
So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more money trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design an appropriate solution and work with their teams to implement it effectively.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
