Integrate the Excellence Journey with the Organization’s Strategy
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.
—Chinese proverb
Once the organization has committed to embark on the path to excellence, engage teams to develop a name, vision, and guiding principles for the excellence journey.
Often underestimated, a name is one of the key contributors to the success of the excellence journey in an organization. In Chapter 1, we discussed the importance of understanding the need for change, and in Chapter 2 we qualified the magnitude of the change required. A purposeful name inspires people to take action, since it translates the organization’s internal need to an external benefit that impacts the customer, patient, or society. It helps people to recognize how their work contributes to the objective of the excellence journey. Take the example of Hospital Heal, which titled its excellence journey “More Time to Care,” with this objective: “To develop an organization that empowers people at all levels to optimize their work processes, and partners with patients and their families to improve the patient experience.”
On the other hand, if an excellence journey shares the same name as the performance improvement methodology itself, it may not be inspiring enough and could have negative connotations in people’s minds. Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile, among other methodologies, have been associated with making people do more with less or a way to reduce head counts from gaining efficiencies. I have heard sarcastic associations of Lean with “Less Employees Are Needed.”
Another important aspect to recognize in the organization is whether the excellence journey is treated as a program, initiative, or an important project in your organization. If it is any of the above, you have made a false start. The leadership commitment can only be acknowledged if the excellence journey has a clearly articulated vision, with guiding principles, and if it is one of the strategic objectives/priorities of the organization’s strategic plan. In all other cases, it is lip service. The commitment has to be demonstrated by the CEO for getting the board/trustees to endorse the journey as one of the key strategic drivers to organizational excellence. The guiding principles hold senior leaders accountable to make ethical decisions, especially during the times of adversity, dilemma, and conflict (Table 4.1).
Table 4.1More Time to Care Vision and Guiding Principles Developed at Hospital Heal
A strategy map is a powerful tool of the Balanced Scorecard framework that visually communicates the cause-and-effect relationships between the strategic objectives and strategic directions for getting buy-in from the board and senior management. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 are examples of how Hospital Heal used the tools of the Balanced Scorecard framework in their communications strategy to demonstrate organizational commitment to their excellence journey, More Time to Care.
Figure 4.1 Hospital Heal’s strategic directions reflected as perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard framework.
Figure 4.2 The strategy map of Hospital Heal includes More Time to Care as one of their key strategic objectives.
Sensei Gyaan: (i) Senior leaders—Don’t create any guiding principle for the excellence journey that you cannot live up to. (ii) Practitioners—Don’t bother to initiate the excellence journey in your organization if it is not a priority of the CEO. Even one designation below won’t cut it.