Learn more about how to increase your Business Excellence Maturity

Look at your Business Excellence Maturity Assessment diagram. To increase the areas that the assessment tells you that you are weak at, look at the "how-to" below.

If you like to know more about the subject and need more detailed information, I suggest that you take a look at my book The 36 Golden Nuggets to a Highly Successful Business, and also my training programs.

Leadership

1 Lead by example.

If someone is going to follow a leader, that leader must also be a good solid example of how the team should act and behave. It is that simple!

2 Take care of the things that create value for your customers.

You are here to deliver value to your customer. All those things that are done in the business to create this value are what a leader should focus on.

3 Make people grow.

People can do so much more than they and others believe. People rise to the challenge. Let them. Give them the basis for doing a good job, trust them, and get out of their way.

4 Make sure that you have the WHY.

The best trigger to get a business working well is for everyone to know why they are there and why he or she should spend 8-10 hours per day working. If a leader does not provide and communicate a good and solid WHY, each individual will find their own. The most common is just to earn some money.

5 Make sure that you have a vision.

When the WHY is in place, the vision will guide you. With a good vision, you make sure that you do not lose direction when the goings get tough. A vision is like a shining beacon in the night, guiding you in the right direction.

6 Make sure that you have strategies.

Strategies tell everyone how they should act in different situations. Strategies are like a backbone in your organization. Make sure that you have them in place.

7 Set goals.

You need to be able to measure and follow up on what is accomplished in the business. You then need goals that you can work towards. The goals set will lead you towards the vision.

Culture

1 Let the teams be self-managed.

No one likes to be micro-managed. The most effective teams are self-managed, meaning that they control their own environment and make their own decisions in order to reach set goals and work towards the clear vision.

2 Result orientated.

Results do not lie. Results are the most important thing. Either you deliver outstanding value to your customers or you do not. Make sure that you focus on delivering that outstanding value. All the other important issues in a business must lead up to the result.

3 Trust in each other.

In order to be efficient and to focus on the value to your customers, you need to have trust in each other within the organization. If everybody knows that the others are doing their part, then they can clear their heads and focus.

4 Trust in the leadership.

People must have trust in the leadership in the organization. People that lead must lead because they are good at it and can play the leadership role well, not because they have been in the company for a long time, are the richest guy in the neighborhood, or are related to the owner. Competence and value creation is what counts. People follow leaders that have earned their respect and trust.

5 Happiness is a must for long time survival.

We spend much of our time working. Therefore it is important that it is also fun and gives energy. Happy people create better value for your customers than unhappy people do. Smile! ☺

Performance

1 Set goals.

To have goals is very important. Without the right goals, you do not know what you should accomplish. Goals should be clearly specified, time-based, measurable, and accepted by the team.

2 Focus on the value created.

The whole enterprise exists only to create value for your customers. Without your customers, there is no enterprise. Make sure that your performance is measured towards satisfying your customers.

3 Focus on the result.

4 Real-time follow-up is a must to act in an even faster world.

In order to manage an organization in an even faster-moving world, you need to make sure that you follow up on your performance in real-time. All too many follow up with statistics, showing them the result from the last month, last quarter, or last year. That is history and you cannot do anything about it. In order to be able to act, you better follow up on the performance here and now.

Quality

1 Make quality everyone’s responsibility.

Quality is not something that is only for a quality department to take care of; it is everyone’s responsibility. Quality needs to be on everyone’s mind. That thinking must be placed into the organization.

2 Make quality a part of everything you do.

Quality is not something that is checked in the end, before handing something over to the customer. Quality is something that must be built into every action taken. It is always cheaper to make things right the first time. If you do not have time to make it right the first time, what makes you believe that you have time to make it all over again?

3 Define what quality is in different processes.

It is in your processes and projects that things are getting done. You need to look into each of them and specify what quality is in each of them. Then you should measure the quality in real-time in those workflows.

4 Control your documents.

Documents must be controlled and sorted in the right way in order to decrease time spent on searching for the right information. All too many organizations have a chaotic document environment, where they spend too much of their time looking for where to store documents and where to find the one they are looking for. But that is not for you. You sort them and store them so that they are accessible where they are needed. That is also a part of good quality.

5 Control your products.

Your product should be of high quality in order to satisfy your customers. Your customers’ expectations of the right quality must be met or exceeded. Even though some have low-priced products, there is no excuse for having bad quality. There are not many things that could annoy a customer as much as crappy quality.

6 Control your customer interaction.

Your customer must be able to come into contact with you. And you need to have contact with them in order to understand their needs and to make sure that you satisfy them. To have control of your customer interaction is to control the flow of information. If you do not control it, someone else, maybe in social media where you are not present, will control it.

Clarity

1 Make sure that everything from business ideas, vision, and more down to goals and action plans are clear.

Fuzzy goals give fuzzy results. Fuzzy minds give fuzzy words. Make sure that you are crystal clear with what you should accomplish. How should anyone be able to live up to unclear expectations? Clarity is a virtue.

2 Make sure that information is accessible where it is needed, when it is needed.

To have information spread out in different places without any order only contributes to an unclear environment. People need to have easy access to the right information at the right time. You should make sure that you connect the information to your processes.

3 Make sure that you have clear rules of play.

In order to make people feel secure and happy, you need to have clear rules of play. There are few things that make people more insecure than having unclear rules. Rules can be written down or not, but they are always there anyhow. Make sure that the most important things in your business are clearly written down. Your efficiency depends on it.

4 Strategies are a must to control the business actions.

Strategies are what give you the backbone in the business when it comes to how people should act.

5 Clear and valuable communication within the organization.

Make sure that the communication within the organization is done in an effective and clear