Learn more about how to increase
the Business Excellence Maturity
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.[/text_block]
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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!
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Take care of the things that create value for your customers.
You are here to deliver a value to your customer. All those things that are done in the business to create this value are what a leader should focus on.
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Take care of the things that create value for your customers.
You are here to deliver a value to your customer. All those things that are done in the business to create this value are what a leader should focus on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 your have them in place.
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Set goals.
You need to be able to measure and follow up what is accomplished in the business. You then need goals that you can work towards. The goals set will lead you towards the vision.
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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 working towards the clear vision.
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Result orientated.
Results do not lie. Results are the most important thing. Either you deliver an 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.
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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 head and focus.
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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 is a related to the owner. Competence and value creation is what counts. People follow leaders that have earned their respect and trust.
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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 give energy. Happy people create a better value for your customers, than unhappy people do. Smile! ☺
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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.
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Focus on the value created.
The whole enterprise exists only to create value for your customers. Without your customers there are no enterprise. Make sure that your performance is measured toward satisfying your customers.
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Focus on the result.
Results do not lie. Results are the most important thing. Either you deliver an 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.
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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 your performance in real time. All too many follow up 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.
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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.
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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 make you believe that you have time to make it all over instead?
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Define what quality is in different processes.
It is in your processes and projects 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.
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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 to many organizations have a chaotic document environment, where they spend to 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.
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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 succeeded. Even though some have low price products, there is no excuse for having bad quality. There are not many things that could annoy a customer as much as crappy quality.
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Control your customer interaction.
Your customer must be able to come in 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 a social media that you are not present in, will control it.
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Make sure that everything from business idea, vision, and more down to goals and action plans are clear.
Fussy goals give fussy results. Fuzzy minds give fussy words. Make sure that you are crystal clear with what you should accomplish. How should any one be able to live up to unclear expectations? Clarity is a virtue.
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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, is only contributing 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.
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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 unsecure 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.
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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.
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Clear and valuable communication within the organization.
Make sure that the communication within the organization is done in an effective and clear way. To send everything in email is just confusing people. Make sure that the information that people need is at the right place at the right time. That will decrease the need of communication between parties. They will then only need to communicate about the rest of the information. That will decrease the amount of information that needs to be communicated.
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Find out the customers’ wants and needs.
First you need to understand what the customer wants. Then in order to be satisfying them in the future as well, you need to understand what they need. The last part is the trickiest, as they many times do not know themselves. To be able to understand their needs, you need to understand their true experience of the whole processes. If you only focus on the part in the customer’s experience where you are involved you might miss a lot. Look instead for the whole end-to-end flow.
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Make the customer part of the process.
You need to understand that you are visiting the customers’ processes – they are not visiting yours. You are here to provide them with something that they want or need, so they should be a part of your best intelligence. Involve them in your thoughts and make sure they know that you what to help them.
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Make sure that you know the Successful Customer Outcome.
What is it that makes the customer be truly satisfied? You need to find out. You need to define the Successful Customer Outcome, and to communicate to everyone in the organization. All need to understand this in order to make it come true.
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Make sure that you understand the Customers’ Experience.
The Customers’ Experience is what the customers experience throughout the whole process, not just a part. A trip to New York is not only the service on the plane. That is a vital part as well, but just a part. The booking, checking in, treatment in immigrations, customs, and so on are also vital parts. It takes only one of them to lower the experience. If you can understand and take control of larger parts that you have today, you can better make sure that the customers are happy throughout the whole process.
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The customers should have an easy way to access you.
A big annoyance is to not be able to contact a supplier. You need to make sure that you have easy access methods of connecting to your customers and vice versa. You want to have contact with them, even if they are angry with you. Don’t hide; instead take control of the interaction.
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Make sure that your products are clear to your team.
Not all organizations think about themselves as having products. That is wrong, as all do. If you work in an environment where you do not talk about products, make sure that you do. Make sure that everyone knows what you deliver and how to find specifications for your products.
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Make the customers a part of the product development.
The products are produced for their sake. You need to understand their expectations. It much easier to make the right choices if you know what the customers expect of you.
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Build a product catalogue.
Your product catalogue must containing descriptions and prices, as well as definition of the value they give or create.
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Start to focus on WHAT is being done in the business, not WHO is doing it.
All to many talk about whom instead of what, and it is natural as we focus so much on the hierarchical line organization. Change focus to what needs to be done to deliver value to your customers. Make sure that you focus on your processes and projects that create the value.
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Minimize the impact from the line organization.
The line organization is an old establishment. The world changes rapidly and it is time to make the final reorganization. But before you take that step, make sure that you during the project focus less on the impact from the line organization and focus on the processes and projects instead.
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Look into other forms of organizations, such as Holacracy, that is role based instead of hierarchical.
Plan for a transfer. There are many new forms of organization that take you closer to Business Excellence. The line organization has been around for so long, and it cannot transform itself any longer. Look into some of the new forms instead.
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Make sure that management is set into roles instead of hierarchy.
To manage the creation of value for your customers, be sure that you focus on the processes and projects, not on the line organization. It is the processes and projects where the value is created, and in both processes and projects the focus is on roles, rather than positions.
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Competence and creation of value is important – position is not.
Position is only telling what part of a line organization someone is responsible for. That is not important! Important is what is done and the customer that is satisfied by this value.
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Make sure that you know what a project is.
A project is a formed group of resources that is set together in order to reach set goals within a specified time and with a specified amount of money.
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Define your projects.
Many organizations do not know how many projects they have and what the purposes of them are. They neither have a project portfolio connecting projects to each other. This is not for you. You create the portfolio and make sure that you control the projects that way.
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Make sure that you have a project model.
It is important to make sure that you have a solid project model that set the tone for how you manage your projects. A project model must not be overwhelming. It makes life so much easier for everyone, and it increases the quality in your work.
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Make sure that the roles in and around a project are defined and then honored.
Roles in the inner circle of a project are usually functioning well, but there are other roles outside the inner circle. Those roles need to function in order to make projects work well. Make sure that you find all these roles stated in the project model, and put them into action.
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Project Manger is the roles that manage the project.
As the project model will tell you, the project manager is the one that has control over the project as it is run. She or he has the input of what to do and by when, and is running the project towards the set goals.
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Your processes must be designed.
All have processes, designed or not. You must make sure that you design them so that people can share the view of what is done and also to be able to improve them. It is hard to improve what you cannot see. The design must be done so that the processes are efficient. The result must be available to all stakeholders.
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Make sure that you have a process structure, as that is your natural organization chart.
Leaving the line organization as the outstanding organizational form, you need another. That is the process structure that will show you how different processes if connected to each other and how they all create value for different stakeholders to the business.
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Understand that the process equals the customer experience.
The process that you design must take into consideration the customer experience, as that is the most important input to delivering a great value.
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Involve partners into your processes.
When you understand the customer experience, then you need to involve others along the process and treat them as partners. Together you will design an efficient process that takes care of all the wants and needs of the customer.
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The need for competence comes from your projects and processes.
You need to understand that the requirement of competence comes only from your projects and processes, as that is where the value is created.
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Those responsible for the competence in the business are not those that run other processes and projects.
You cannot have the same person be responsible for competence at the same time as he or she is responsible for projects or processes. Competence must be treated with a strategic view, with an overview of the whole organization. A process or project leader’s main focus is on delivering the right value. To develop competence you need a competence leader as well.
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Make sure that you build a competence organization with competence domains and a responsible person.
Competence becomes more strategic than ever, and you need an organization that handles people and their competence.
