Every good business owner or manager wants to run a business known for excellence, and for delivering the very best service to their customers. But how do you find and sustain that commitment to excellence in your organization?
The secret is to break it down for every single individual employee in the company, from the CEO to the most junior worker. The most successful businesses are ones that strive for excellence up and down the line. Everyone must understand their specific role in the grand scheme of things, embrace their expectations, and hold themselves and their co-workers accountable for meeting those lofty standards.
For example, if you’re in charge of shipping product, your job is to expedite everything being moved that day, to make sure it’s ready and accurate so everything gets on the truck and delivered correctly. If your role is receptionist, you want to make sure every single office visitor is greeted with a smile and professional courtesy, and the phone is answered with an attitude that is positive and helpful.
You can never start too early with indoctrinating employees into a culture of excellence. Ideally, it should begin with the orientation process for new employees, and continue as part of their ongoing evaluation process. Each worker needs to be familiar with how their job functions in the delivery of your service or product, and how a single weak link can undermine the performance of the whole group.
Every employee should be made to feel that their work is vital to the company’s chain of service or manufacturing, and that excellence in their position will be recognized – as will a failure to meet expectations.
While maintaining high standards, don’t create an environment where employees are reluctant to bring a problem forward. That avoidance of reality can lead to disaster. Consider the recent recall related to the failure of ignition switches by General Motors. Years ago one or more engineers realized there was a defect that could be fixed with a part that cost $1.25. But they were either too afraid or unwilling to make waves.
Because nobody put their hand up to zero in on this issue, now it has mushroomed into a wide vehicle recall that will cost GM hundreds of millions of dollars and loss of esteem in the marketplace. This goes to show that “little things” in the company’s process can compound to become huge problems.
In some organizations, the top managers are notorious for greeting bad news with fire and brimstone, and only wanting yes-men and yes-women around them. That’s not conducive to maintaining a corporate culture of excellence.
The commitment to excellence cannot just flow downhill from manager to employee. It should be a universal desire to hold each other accountable – whether peer to peer, supervisor to subordinate, even rank-and-file employee to boss. It’s about developing a culture that says if something is outside the company’s boundaries of expectations, you’re going to be called on it. Disruptions will not be swept under the carpet.
Everyone makes mistakes – we’re all human, that’s how we learn. The true test of character is how we react to our mistakes.
If we acknowledge and correct our errors, and take proactive steps to ensure they don’t happen again, our co-workers and customers will judge us positively in our ability to handle adversity. If you work hard to correct any mistakes and strive to inconvenience the client as little as possible, they will want to keep doing business with you.
We should never stop trying to fine-tune our organization’s system of delivering our product or service in a way that will result in excellence. The ultimate test is the marketplace, and what your clients say about you.
If we can help you find ways to better deliver excellence within your organization, please contact Mike Bedel at (317) 613-7852 or email [email protected].