Operational Excellence System: How to Create High- Performance Teams

Excellence Forum

We are in a turbulent era which requires every organisation to adapt quickly and organisations that survive are those that are not scared to introduce disruptive ideas.

One of those ideas is to move away from traditional model of organisation which gives management the sole responsibility and power to be accountable to business failure and successes. Every employee must come on board and collectively take responsibility of leadership and ownership of where they are working.

This traditional model makes many businesses’ operational systems weak, reduces their quality orientation and performance. It is unacceptable to be still having a bureaucratic culture and command control systems which create rigidity, lack of adaptability and accountability in the current VUCA world.

Modern employees are highly- skilful and creative and they need an enabling work ecosystem to full utilise their potential and reduce the idling culture. This bureaucratic model has been used in the first industrial revolution and is no longer working because is not suitable to address the current business demands and adapt to environmental forces.

High performing organisations have adopted self- management organisation model which institutionalise and empower self- directed teams ( High Performance Work Teams) to increase the level of employee involvement and engagement in the workplace.

These high performance work teams are given authority to manage daily operations of their departments and they are empowered to make both operational and strategic decisions.

They are sometimes given the authority to manage management processes such as setting objectives, strategic decisions on effective management of resources, problem solving, innovation and introducing cutting ideas to improve the business service excellence.

Operational excellence happens when everyone can see his or her role in implementing the organisation strategic projects as well as the flow of value that create final products on their daily processes and that comes when there is collective leadership, collective responsibility and an ecosystem where people truly work as a team.

This week’s article focuses on how organisations can shift from traditional model of operating by introducing high- performing work teams that have ownership of their work processes and is a tactical approach of improving work systems.

Some of the reasons why self- autonomous teams are used is to cultivate and fully optimise the potential of employees and improve their job satisfaction.

Another reason is to create a proactive organisation with people- led intelligent systems capable of generating future environmental insights well in time to ignite employees’ creativity and innovation. There are six phases that organisations have to undertake to build high- performance work teams.

The first phase requires management to consult and sensitise core stakeholders such as orientating management, employees and union on the rationale of introducing these work systems, the rationale for the change, cost- benefit analysis, potential risk and obtain their full support and buy- in.

The second phase is to create an ecosystem for self- autonomous teams and this means introducing or reviewing policies to suit the new selfmanaged teams working model. It also requires organisations to develop efficient processes to support the new high performance working teams and these processes include planning, communication, implementation and project support processes and others which are critical.

The phase also requires management to develop values and establish guiding principles of teams, streams of work linkages and new power structure.

The third phase requires executive management to eliminate the first line management and supervisory roles that are typically reactive in nature because they wait to see what is happening on their operational system and act when it is too late.

This is how the organisation creates a flat structure where departments start working as teams rather than group of people with similar qualifications. It is imperative to including all relevant members from all the value chain streams in these teams, allocate roles and responsibility, timeline of completing predetermined projects and expected work standards to be fulfilled.

The fourth phase involves training these teams on the expected behavioural patterns, the approaches, processes and tools that they will be using, ways of handling current volatile change and most importantly, to instil a sense of responsibility and ownership of their work processes.

The fifth phase requires executive management to operationalise these teams and use tools like gemba walk, team dashboard and Hoshin Kanri. It also requires monitoring and sustaining self- directed teams work systems and continually improving it so that it matures into operational culture of high- performing organisations.

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.