Ryan Gausman

Excellence is the quality that propels organizations into greatness and success.  It is the competitive advantage in a competitive world.  What does it look like?  How do we do it?  Our customers and those we serve expect it but it is hard to find, it's a rare quality.  When they do find it they are excited and can't tell enough of their friends and associates about us.  Each of our organizations must go through the process to define what excellence is going to look like for us, what are the expectations our customers have for us?  Unless we go through this exercise and come up with a plan, all we have is a promise of that we can't deliver.  It's a simple process but it pays huge dividends.

Our team is only as good as the people on it.  When we have an opportunity to hire a new person it is our responsibility to do the due diligence to find someone who will be a positive, constructive, contributing member of our team.  Our people expect that from us and our future success as leaders depends on how strong each member of our team is.  Take it seriously.

Inc. Magazine cited a Gallup study which identified the reason why 70 percent of American employees are unengaged, disinterested, or even hostile toward their company.  That means 30 percent are those engaged high performers we all want in our organization.  What are we doing wrong and what can we do, as leaders to remedy that situation, to move the 70 percent into the 30 percent group?  It comes down to taking another look at where our leadership teams come from.

There is a lot of talk in leadership training circles about being an empathetic leader, one who seeks to understand the feelings and opinions of those around them.  That is certainly a requirement but compassion takes empathy and puts it into action to bring about good changes in our team and its members. As excellent leaders compassion must be a driving force in our toolkit of values.

If we aspire to be leaders we must understand, the success of our efforts is as much dependent upon who we are as it is upon what we do.  We can say and do all the right things but if we don't have a relationship of trust, respect, and transparency with them they will reject us as leaders every time.  People choose to follow those whom the respect, it's something we have to earn.

Excellence is a critical requirement for organizations which are growing and improving.  Without a commitment to excellence and the processes in place to build it, we will become irrelevant, boring, and uninteresting to our customers and those we serve, ultimately being passed up and replaced by our harder-working competitors.  Excellence is also an critical component and characteristic of engaged, committed, cohesive teams which are the secret to the success and growth of our organization.  Only excellent leaders with a plan and a commitment to make it happen succeed.

We often promote our best workers, the highly efficient, high production, hard charging allstars to leadership roles then wonder what happened when they fail.  We watch in disbelief when this great producer, the allstar, crashes and burns because they can't engage their team and they fail to perform or to succeed in reaching any of the goals we set for their team. What just went wrong and how can we prevent this from happening?

The Vision and Mission statements of our organization drive everything we do.  They define our purpose, the benefits we plan to provide to those who use our service or products, and the process and methods we plan to employ to accomplish them.  Most organizations don't completely develop their mission which leaves them disorganized and without clear direction in how to accomplish it.

All communication between people involves filters.  Just because we tell somebody else something doesn't mean they received the same message we intended to send, or that their response will be what we anticipated.  Our response is always based upon the relationship we have with the person sending the message and it is based upon our belief of what their motive was.  We filter messages through the "why did they say that" filter.  When we say thank you we can get responses varying to genuine appreciation to anger and suspicion based upon the relationship we have previously built with that person.  Leaders must understand this dynamic.

In this episode I discuss two articles I read in automotive industry magazines which discuss the principles of leadership.  These are examples of the results which can be achieved through application of the principles of leadership and excellence.  Again, customer relationships and building employee engagement come to the forefront as the number one things which drive success and satisfaction.