Element 5: Operational Excellence

We've been talking about 10 Elements of Leadership. The topic today is operational excellence.

Operational excellence is the culture of continuous and sustainable improvement with everything you do. And there are 3 critical steps to achieve operational excellence. In today's video, we're going to break those down for you.

 Step 1 is having a repeatable process: a starting point, an end point, and the desired steps in between to get you from start to finish. So let's take an example: grocery shopping. We all engage in grocery shopping. The starting point is empty shelves and probably an empty refrigerator. So we go to the store, we purchase our items, we come home, and we unpack our groceries. A solid process - Step 1.

 Step 2 of operational excellence is reducing variation with your process. Let's go back to the grocery shopping. Since you've been grocery shopping for quite some time, you're probably reducing variation without even realizing it. For example, you're probably going to the same store. You're probably going the same time of the week, and you're probably buying the same brands. You have taken some simple steps to reduce variation to get the most consistent outcome for taste, time, and cost. Step 2 - reducing variation with your process.

 Step 3 of operational excellence is improving the process. Again, if we stay with the grocery store analogy, you've probably made some improvements to your shopping process that you don't even realize. If I look at my wife's list, it looks like a little chessboard. There are these clusters of groceries all over the sheet of paper. What she's done is organize our groceries to match the flow of the store so that we make one trip through and get everything we need, versus bouncing back and forth from Aisle 1 to Aisle 15 back to Aisle 2 back to Aisle 14 by going down this random list of groceries. So what she's done is, she's made the process more efficient, she's simplified it. Step 3 - improve the process.

So as you reflect on your own responsibilities, whether you manage business practices, product design, city management, IT, or even fly an aircraft, everything you do has a start point, and end point, and steps in between. So ask yourself: Do I have a clear end result? Am I reducing variation? Am I constantly looking for ways to improve my process? Without a stable, repeatable process, operational excellence is impossible.

Thanks for taking the time to learn more about operational excellence. In our next video, we'll be talking about innovation. For more thoughts on leadership, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on LinkedIn, or visit our website wynstonepartners.com.

Remember: better leaders, better business.