From Mediocrity To Mastery: The 5 Scales Of Operational Excellence
As titans steering the ship of a company, you stand at the helm of modern business where competition, innovation, and the necessity for change is endless. The path from mediocre operations and mastery is not a leap, but a measured ascent. Each step up the mountain represents intentional effort, effective teams, and strategic guidance.
Yet, how often do you pause to evaluate where you are on your climb up the mountain? We often set blind KPI’s, goals without vision, or score performance without clear expectations. It’s critical we take a step back and become aware of where we fall on the scale of operational excellence.
First, it’s important to get on the same page of what operational excellence even is. Through countless case studies, client projects, and my own experimentation with the team at Auxo Business Services, we’ve identified:
Four pillars that we define operational excellence by
Five elements that contribute to our operational excellence
Five scales to identify how operationally excellent we are
The Four Pillars:
These pillars define what we consider to be operational excellence and contribute to how we identify the five scales.
Organization: A foundational, almost common sense element, but not so commonly implemented. Organization means you (and your team) know where to find important information and know what to do with new information.
Clarity & Confidence: You (and your team) are clear on what you’re doing and are confident that what you’re doing is moving your goals forward.
Efficiency & Ease: You (and your team) not only know what you’re responsible for but how you execute these tasks make sense and reduce stress in day-to-day work
Systematic Scalability: We are able to scale the business with predictable profitability, limited employee turnover, and increased client retention (the ultimate goal of operational excellence).
The Five Elements:
These elements contribute to how we achieve mastery of operational excellence and can be directly tied back to one or more of the four pillars.
Goal-Task Alignment: Is what we’re working on related to our goals?
Customer-Centric Processes: Is what we’re working on contributing to what our clients care about and are willing to pay for?
System Utilization & Automation: Are we fully leveraging the technology that we pay for to boost our efficiency, productivity, and work satisfaction?
Process Improvement: Are we continuously considering better ways to execute on our processes?
Effective Delegation: Do we have the right people in the right roles and are we aware of how we are setting expectations for them to succeed?
The Five Scales:
These scales help to identify what pitfalls we have succumbed to in our operations and can provide direction on how to continue our climb in more effective and impactful ways.
To determine where you might be on the scale, take our How Effective Are Your Operations? Quiz.
Inefficient Chaos
What It Means: This place on the scale is indicated by erratic and unsustainable
processes and team performances.
Why It’s Happening: As leaders, we’re creating high levels of confusion through a lack of direction, unclear expectations, poor communication, and impulsiveness that is not tied to an effective vision.
The Impacts: Our bottom line is suffering, we consistently miss goals (or have the feeling of being unsuccessful because we haven’t set goals to be measured by) and are unlikely to achieve any growth or stability. We’re likely to become burnt out without results to show for our hard work.Struggling To Sustain
What It Means: There are processes or team members that show potential in our business yet we still have inconsistent performance and wildly varying levels of client/customer satisfaction.
Why It’s Happening: Our processes have unidentified bottlenecks and other inefficiencies, we may communicate well in-person but struggle to maintain that in remote or hybrid environments, we limit vision and goal-oriented communication to managers, and we aren’t confidently delegating to our team. We may lean too heavily into an idealistic vision for our business that isn’t backed by strategy and clearly defined goals.
The Impacts: We may struggle with client retention forcing more energy to be focused on our sales team and increasing stress on our operations team. Additionally, there is a lack of adaptability if a big challenge, project, or threat impacts our business.Staying Afloat
What It Means: Our business is maintaining its position but struggling to make progress and be represented as an industry leader.
Why It’s Happening: We have provided a clear vision for our business and have found ways to effectively execute on low-risk goals. While our operations have provided stability thus far, there are still some areas of our processes and team responsibilities that lack clarity and direction. We may switch which strategic initiatives should take priority and we underutilize our systems, taking a “it’s good enough” approach to our current processes.
The Impacts: We may experience turnover with our high performers. The constant shift of priorities inhibits our ability to make a real impact on any initiative which in turn challenges our revenue goals. We may spend more money on advertising and marketing than is actually needed, limiting funds for new service or product development, team development initiatives, or other areas that could advance our business.Steady Performance
What It Means: We’re consistently achieving our goals. There are some areas for improvement but overall there’s a level of satisfaction and confidence in our business’ performance.
Why It’s Happening: We have effectively leveraged our systems, created mostly efficient processes, and communicate well with our team. Not only are delegated tasks effectively communicated but so are vision, mission, and goal-oriented messages.
The Impacts: There is some predictability to our revenue. We may have stressful situations but they are manageable because we can rely on our team and our processes. We are able to scale with consistently positive client reviews. We are currently (or are on track to be) considered an industry leader. Our expenses are lean, providing room in our budget for team raises, investing in our initiatives, and other important areas.Thriving Excellence
What It Means: Your operations are lean and effective allowing you to achieve amazing results in your business. There is not only satisfaction with our business performance but an excitement in realizing what we’re truly capable of.
Why It’s Happening: There’s a clear vision directing processes, team performance, and goals. There’s a commitment to eradicating problem areas in our processes and systems. We show our team that their voice is valued and make changes based on their feedback.
The Impacts: We have minimal employee turnover and produce effective leaders in our organization. We not only have systematic scalability proven in our achieved goals and revenue, but have flexibility in our budget to experiment with our marketing, product and service development, culture building initiatives, and more.
Your role as a leader doesn’t just require adaptation and the willingness to improve, it demands honesty and self-awareness. Because, you’re not just steering a ship, but charting a course toward operational excellence so that you can have the systematic scalability that all businesses crave.
To get to a place of thriving excellence, you need to lean into the five elements that contribute to operational excellence - goal-task alignment, customer centricity, system automation, process improvement, and effective delegation. It can be a challenging journey but the rewards are immensely worth it.
Get clear on where you and your team stand with our operational excellence quiz. It’s a simple 10-question assessment based on our four pillars and five contributing elements to help identify where on the scale you are. We’ll also provide some easy action items based on your score to help guide you.
Take your quiz here.