The One Thing That Builds a Culture of Excellence

What occupies business leaders when they think about the value of Excellence? Three things:

• How to build a culture of excellence.
• How to maintain a culture of excellence.
• How to rebuild a culture of excellence when it’s been lost.

Unfortunately, very few business leaders purposely define and develop their organization’s culture — they just kind of let it happen. The same is true with the value of excellence. It is often just assumed to be there, which may be why so many companies struggle with quality and/or performance issues – two key components of excellence.

To me, building a culture of excellence is like building a healthy marriage. It requires significant investment of time and energy. It also requires continuous effort and investments to maintain it. And when it gets messed up, it takes a LOT of work to repair it and make it strong again.

From my experience, success or failure in this area can be distilled down to one thing: how much do people CARE.

When people care, excellence increases.

When people stop caring, excellence decreases.

Note that I did not reference employees or managers here. This is about human behavior.

For leaders, this paints a straightforward picture:

• When leaders care about their people, the people will care about what they do. This produces excellence that expands.
• When leaders stop caring about their people, the people will stop caring about what they do. This causes a decrease in excellence.

While this concept might be simple to portray, the reality is that there are many issues constantly crying for the attention of leaders. The end result is that often the needs of the people in a company take a backseat to other demanding issues (just like in a marriage) – and thereby so does excellence.

Improving a Culture of Excellence

Companies that are known for excellence, such as Zappos, USAA, and Honeywell, have created a culture of excellence. It’s built into their DNA.

So what can leaders do when they recognize they have a weak culture of excellence and desire to improve it? Recognize that it requires changing the company’s DNA. This is not a quick fix or overnight pursuit. It’s a long and arduous process. But the rewards can be remarkably positive and long lasting.

Here are a few recommendations to improve a culture of excellence.

1. Engage C.E.O.S. Ask Customers, Employees, Owners (Shareholders) and Suppliers what excellence means to them. Get an understanding of what competitors are doing, what the marketplace expects, and what the company is capable of delivering.
2. Define Excellence. The pursuit of excellence is unique to each company. So it’s important to define exactly what it looks like. What are the metrics? How will everyone know when it’s achieved?
3. Incentivize the team. While money can be a good short-term motivator, there is lots of research showing that reward and recognition programs are the best long-term incentives. A few specific recommendations include:
   1. Acknowledge good work. This can be done face-to-face, via email or even in the company newsletter. Note: managers often need training on how to do this well.
   2. Reward performance, not long hours. Employees need to be encouraged for getting the right work done quickly.
   3. Provide creative reward options. When the team achieves targeted metrics, offer memorable rewards, such as a flexible work schedule, time off, and/or free lunches.
   4. Promote healthy work/life balance. To help encourage a culture of excellence, offer gym memberships, a wellness plan, and/or time off for family or personal events.
4. Be transparent. Set up a system for continuous feedback and learning. Let everyone know what’s working well and what’s not. If quality and/or performance is sub-par, be transparent with the facts. Assume people really do care and have the intelligence to identify and fix the problems.
5. Carefully manage change. Excellence is achieved by creating systems that improve workflow and establish predictable outcomes. But to achieve targeted metrics, these systems need to be continually tweaked. So it’s critical to explain every change and the rationale behind it. Remember, people need to know their leaders care about them.

Living the Values

It may surprise some that it’s not necessary to list Excellence as a core value in order to cultivate a culture of excellence. Indeed, Excellence is one of the 17 Common Values that doesn’t necessarily need to be stated. It’s a value that customers, employees, shareholders, and even suppliers expect from every company (to some degree).

In other words, every company still needs to identify its differentiating values – those values that define what makes it unique and sets it apart from competitors.

So another way to consider building a culture of excellence is to encourage all employees to make sure their decisions and behaviors are aligned with the company’s values. When combined with the need for everyone to authentically care, this might best be encouraged using the acronym LOVE: Living Our Values Every Day.

In a strong culture of excellence, the focus is on the outcome, but it’s love and care that makes it happen.