How to develop a High Performing Organisation

High performing organisations is a buzzword mostly echoed in the boardrooms of many organisations.

Shockingly, 95 percent of business leaders do not know how to create a high- performing organisation and as a result their organisations never transform to this desired state and they are unable to deliver the value propositions they made to their principals, customers and stakeholders.

There is no way that organisations can become high- performing when they have weak culture, weak operational systems and when they fail to measure and improve the performance of each universal excellence principles explained towards the end of this article.

This is the reason why CEOs and Managing Directors have short lifespan in their positions because they are unable to create high- performing organisations. Therefore, it is not surprising that quality orientation of businesses in Botswana is extremely low and that makes customers to pay excessive prices for commodities and services than they could have ordinarily paid if the cost of quality was not high. Some of the major examples of poor quality in Botswana is unreliable mobile networks, persistent implementation crisis and “system is down” conundrum.

A quality pioneer by the name of Philip Crosby once said quality is free and it does not cost money to make it part of the organisational culture. This means, the absence of quality is what makes organisations spend more than 40 percent of their annual budgets in failure, appraisal and prevention costs.

Example of these costs are continuous meetings where management talk about organisational problems throughout the year and still fail to find solutions to them. It also includes the cost of rework, guarantee cost and the cost of losing customers to other competitors. This week’s article addresses how organisations can develop high- performance system by adopting quality/ excellence principles and drivers. Quality is a culture of conforming and exceeding customer expectations and excellence is a state of being extremely good in attaining set performance targets consistently. This implies that high- performance organisations have a culture of doing things right the first time by entrenching quality into the entire system and making excellence a habit of every member of the organisation. This system’s drivers are; excellence leadership, strategy, process orientation, customer focused, employees focused, operational excellence, resource management, measurement and knowledge management and resultsfocused. Excellence leadership is how the organisation management provides direction and manages employees to achieve the strategic objectives. This direction requires management to create an excellence culture and consistently abide with high- governance standards.

Tools that are used to measure the performance of leadership are leadership assessment surveys and leadership maturity metrics. Moreover, another important driver of high performance organisation is the strategy which is the way organisations develop their strategic direction, make strategic choices and implement these strategic choices.

The approaches used should be within the international best practices and there should be agility in strategy implementation coupled with robust control system. Tools that are used to measure strategy implementation are strategy dashboard, scorecard and these are some of the main tool set that every manager should have.

Another principle of high- performing organisations is customer orientation which is the way the business engages its customers to understand their expectations, deduce customer value recipe that addresses their expectations and capture them using quality deployment function and deliver quality products and services. Customer orientation also includes the way the business cares about its clients through service strategies and improvement of its delivery mechanism. Tools that are normally used to manage customerfocused principles are market surveys, customer satisfaction survey, voice of the customer system and customer experience journey.

Furthermore, another principle of excellence- oriented organisation is people orientation which is how the organisation acquires, develops, deploys and retains its employees to sustain their performance.

The current best trend of motivating employees is to provide them with quality of life in the workplace, embrace collective leadership and introduce high- performance work teams. Operational excellence is also a driver of high- performance organisations and it is how the business designs, manages and improves its work systems and process to deliver quality products and services to its clientele. Business operations should be agile so that they can quickly adapt and cope with the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Lastly the organisations should be results- focused and this means attainment of set performance targets of all the above principles as well as financial, community and environmental results.

The Author is a member of African Excellence Forum, Holds Master of Science Degree in Strategic Management and is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organisational Excellence from America Society for Quality. Six Sigma Greenbelt, ISO 9001: 2015 Certified. Contact: 72211182, Website: www. iqm. co. bw