The culture of an organization reflects how its various stakeholders like employees, customers, vendors and society at large experience the organization and its brand. A culture of excellence is not a result of chance but a result of consistent actions and intentional behaviours that drive high performance. The American philosopher and writer Will Durant has summed this up beautifully when he stated, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.

Mark Manson the author on many popular self-help books and a blogger, in one of his articles where he defends the idea of being average, makes an interesting observation where he points out that to become truly great at something, you must dedicate time and energy to it. Building a corporate culture of excellence too requires both time and concerted efforts to nurture. It exists and evolves based on consistent actions and intentional behaviors by way of redefining and implementing your organizational ‘values’. Organizational values are behaviors that drive performance.

A culture of excellence is not created based on a well-defined mission or vision but on the way in which each individual member/teams in the organization unlock their potential by prioritizing excellence and adapting to change in the dynamic business environment. The market dynamics in the past few years have necessitated a shift of focus from short-term objectives to more sustainable long-term competitive advantages by promoting a culture of excellence. Workplace excellence goes beyond merely achieving targets to a realm of commitment, to improve, innovate, and consistently achieve the highest levels of excellence. As an organization evolves over time, so will its culture of excellence. Fostering a culture of excellence allows organizations to be progressive and anticipating rather than just reacting to problems.

Building a workplace culture of excellence involves nurturing an environment where employees are motivated, engaged and aligned with the organization’s objectives and values. Here are some key strategies to achieve this:

Define excellence and communicate your purpose clearly

Clearly articulate your expectations about excellence and define what it would mean in their respective roles and responsibilities. Align your purpose as the central component of your culture which explains the reason for your existence. It should explain why the work that you do is important and should serve both as an inspiration and motivation for your employees. Establish core values that reflect the organization’s commitment to excellence. Ensure that these values are integrated into everyday practices and decision making. Translate these values into behavioral indicators which are integrated into your performance management system PMS, where potential and demonstrated performance form the basis of your performance appraisal framework. Include excellence as a path to help you achieve your vision. For example, our vision “to be a thought leader in the industry that we operate” paves the path to a culture of excellence.

Leadership commitment

The essence of inspirational leadership is rooted in the ability to influence and motivate the team by going beyond merely providing directions. Leaders should model the behaviors and attitudes that they wish to see in their teams. To have a highly engaged workforce, and by extension a high-performance organization the employees need strategic alignment with the organizational objectives. This is the responsibility of the leadership team to bring in the required clarity of purpose and direction and living it out in their roles. For example, in our organization the principle of ‘staying relevant’ through the philosophy of ‘continuous learning’ is led by example with the executive leadership team dedicating time to learn new courses in their respective segments every year at a global level through academic institutes of eminence.

Focus on creating high potential

An organization which wants to build a culture of excellence needs to focus on building the potential of its employees. For many organizations this would be a complete shift in moving from performance management to potential management, where the entire focus would be on building and managing employee potential, wherein performance would be the natural output. Most companies who work on reactionary problem solving for enhancing performance lose the focus of the larger vision of building a culture of excellence. Every employee should be supported and encouraged to gain mastery in their area of expertise and to continue to stay relevant. Hyper-personalization of learning and the shifting of collaborative learning from theory to practice will further help to build capabilities and enhance the potential of your employees. Hi-pots should be nurtured and rewarded in all aspects as a part of an established ‘excellence framework’, which will encourage the average employee to strive for excellence.

Customer Experience

Continuous improvement in business fosters a culture of excellence, where organizations constantly evaluate themselves against an industry benchmark of excellence in the quest for enhanced efficiencies, innovation and customer experience. A customer experience focused approach places the customer at the center of all improvement efforts to deliver value and exceed expectations. However, continuous improvement is not easy in a culture of excellence, as we focus on each business process to make it perfect and then move on to the next level of operational excellence, by understanding the market needs and creating a value stream that would satisfy their needs. Continuous improvement should be seen as a means to an end and hence, aligned to the organizational objectives and the employee’s key performance indicators KPI’s to create an enhanced customer experience in the short term, and a sustainable competitive advantage in the long term.

Employee empowerment

Employee empowerment refers to the authority and freedom that an organization gives its employees to make the appropriate decisions to achieve their goals which are aligned with the objectives of the organization. Without empowerment the best that we can expect from the employees is following best practices. As ‘good’ is the enemy of ‘great’ so is the concept of ‘best practices’ to continuous improvement and innovation. Best practices at best can be a starting point to trigger an innovative solution and not its end point.

The Harvard Business Review in their article on this topic makes an important observation that “empowering” leaders should know when they can be most effective. For example, most of the organizations who harp on creativity and innovation and would be willing to invest in all the tools, technology and training fail to realize that apart from all these, what the employee’s require the most is the space to make mistakes safely. More than the fear of failure, it is the fear of the consequences of failure that prevents employees from exploring their ideas and bringing them to fruition.

It is also important to create a culture where feedback is received and given regularly to facilitate continuous improvement along with continuous learning and professional growth. There is no one size fits all solution for employees as their needs are different depending on which stage of career, they are in the employee life cycle. We have developed a career progression framework which maps the employees across an employee life cycle wherein we identify the key triggers for their growth and progression, depending on which stage of the employee life cycle they are in at that point in time. For example, in the early part of their career they would be interested more in learning opportunities that would be available in the role than about their compensation or organizational transparency.

Embracing change

The biggest challenge to ‘change’ is the inherent inertia towards it. Change is difficult for most people as it takes them away from their comfort zone. We often embrace change based on the prevailing trends which may or may not be for achieving excellence. History has taught us that organizations need to change/adapt as per the needs of the society at different times, failing which they may become redundant. However, leaders must be also willing to embrace change to improve or innovate for excellence.

Change is a crucial value for both survival and to achieve excellence in this era of digital transformation. What we need to achieve this change is primarily, embracing a digital mindset or having the appropriate attitude and the right set of behaviours like agility, adaptation, and collaboration that enable people and organizations to foresee the possibilities and working towards building a culture of excellence.

In conclusion

A culture of excellence requires thoughtful planning, strategic alignment, and continued progress towards achieving a sustainable competitive edge in the industry that you operate. Building a culture of excellence would mean reworking your definition of excellence to develop an eco-system where employees make a habit of consistently producing their best work every time. Jay-Z the rapper and song writer sum’s this up aptly, “Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That is just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it…that is excellence”