A culture of excellence

A couple weeks ago, I attended a fascinating webinar called, "Creating a Culture Committed to Excellence." I was interested in the subject because I've often felt that a company's culture has a decisive effect on how it behaves, far more decisive than its Quality Management System. And I'm sure you've all seen the Internet meme about the relative importance of culture and strategy. But I've never had any clear or practical ideas how to create a culture of excellence.

Meme from an article by Fred Waswa on LinkedIn, March 19, 2020

The point of the webinar was that you really can create such a culture. I didn't get the complete recipe — it was only one talk, and the speaker works for a consulting firm that charges good money for this kind of thing — but the basic idea was to identify nine fundamental principles that define a culture of excellence and then determine which good management practices embody and enforce those principles. The speaker said that for small organizations, they had developed a list of 51 good management practices to implement; for large organizations, the list doubled in size to 102.

(In case you are curious, the consulting firm is called Organizational Excellence Specialists. The founder and principal is Dawn Ringrose. They are a Canadian company located in British Columbia, and you can find the website here: https://organizationalexcellencespecialists.ca/.)

The nine principles are as follows:

1. Leadership involvement
2. Alignment
3. Focus on the customer
4. People involvement (cooperation and teamwork)
5. Prevention-based process management
6. Partnership development
7. Continuous improvement
8. Data-based decision making
9. Societal commitment

This list might look familiar. In fact, it should. The ISO 9001:2015 standard gives an almost-identical list of "Quality management principles in clause 0.2. That list has seven elements instead of nine, and runs as follows:

The quality management principles are:

• customer focus; → matches (3) focus on the customer
• leadership; → matches (1) leadership involvement, and (2) alignment
• engagement of people; → matches (4) people involvement
• process approach; → matches (5) prevention-based process management
• improvement; → matches (7) continuous improvement
• evidence-based decision making; → matches (8) data-based decision making
• relationship management. → matches (6) partnership development, and (9) societal commitment

What's important, though, is not that the nine principles are unoriginal. If anything, that's a benefit: it means that when a company implements a program like this one to achieve excellence, their work should be fully consistent with the measures they have already taken (or might take in the future) to achieve Quality. It's reassuring to hear that excellence and Quality have something to do with each other.

No, the important part is that someone has thought through what concrete activities — what good management practices — serve to implement these principles in the real world, to plant and nurture them in soil where they might not have otherwise sprouted on their own. I have not myself worked with Organizational Excellence Specialists, so I can't vouch directly for the impact of their work (though their website has a full page of testimonials from satisfied customers). But I welcome the attention to culture. For all of us in Quality, that has to be the next frontier.