For businesses or organization to be successful in the long term, it is imperative that they be engaged in an unremitting quest to make things better in various areas of operations. The pursuit for excellence is one of the best known characteristics of great leaders. The fact hardly needs mentioning that the relentless pursuit for success through excellence is what brings out the best in every individual. Businesses that fail to make operational excellence an organizational priority will, without doubt, create an environment for a steady organizational decline.
Why Apply Operational Excellence?
The standard definition of ‘Operational Excellence’ is that it is the goal of conducting business in a manner that improves quality, obtains higher yields, faster throughput, and minimizes wastage. Operational Excellence is applicable to every level and every person in the organization, from executives all the way down to the employees working on the production floor. The best thing about Operational Excellence is that it is not only practical but actionable and easy to understand.
Operational excellence can be achieved by having a holistic approach, which culminates in integrating operations management and business methodologies in such a manner that it maximizes assets and processes. There has to be complete harmony among all areas of operations for maximizing excellence.
Observe What Successful Leaders do to Achieve Optimum Output
It is erroneous to think of Operational Excellence as a program, a new set of business improvement tools or a new fad. It must be seen as the outcome of an enterprise-wide practice, which demands ideal behavior across the board and based on best business principles.
Some of the most successful leaders in corporate history are those with a great vision and values in principles of operational excellence. They influence and accelerate a transformation in the areas of thinking, behavior, and action of everyone down the line. Such leaders can create a lasting culture of operational excellence effortlessly and this helps their organizations to remain on the top of the heap even in a highly competitive business niche.
Achieving Ideal Behavior Across the Board
In any organization, the work ethic followed is the outcome of a system. Systems are designed either to produce a definite end goal or they evolve and develop on their own. Systems can drive the conduct and behavior of employees. In other words, they can create the environment in an organization that causes people to approach work in a particular way.
Systems that are poorly designed can create huge amounts of variation in behavior and thus significant discrepancies in end result of specific tasks. Operational excellence can be successfully woven into an organization’s system when there is ideal behavior that can readily translate into consistently superior results.
Top executives must clearly define ideal, principle-based behaviors for leaders in every department of an organization including managers and associates. Managers, in turn, must design front line work systems to drive the ideal behaviors desired in the organization further down the hierarchy. Tools must be developed or chosen to ensure that the systems function like a well-oiled machine. Every employee must use the tools and methods identified to ensure the smooth and efficient functioning of an organization.
