Searching For The Starting Point To Create The Effective Organisation?
The benefit of making your organisation an effective organisation is clear
. By focusing on your customers and delivering quality and value, you build a more profitable business for yourself. The key question is "Where to start?" Creating clear, distinctive and essential roles for the organisation and its internal departments sets you on the right road.
"Why bother?" you may well ask. Well, creating an effective organisation is about choosing to do the right things. Any organisation that consistently strives to focus on what is right for their customer, and by implication eliminates things that are not necessary, will tend to prosper at the expense of those organisations that do not.
The effective organisation brings to its customers the prizes of quality of delivery and value for money. My colleague raves about a little Moroccan restaurant, which produced excellent food at really low prices. The combination brought even more customers. The result was a prospering business.
Do you Belong to an Effective Organisation?
If I ask you the question, "Do you belong to an effective organisation?" you may be tempted to answer positively, and point to the good things that the organisation has done in justification. If I ask the question slightly differently, "Do you think that your organisation could become more effective?" then most of you, I suspect, would answer "Yes we could improve." It doesn't matter how you are performing now, it is always possible to get better. In recognition of that, many of the most effective organisations have embraced the continuous improvement principle as one of their underpinning values.
You may already be open to the idea that making the organisation effective is a key factor for any organisation that seeks to deliver increased value and improved services to their customers. It is certainly one of the ways that can differentiate you from the crowd.
You may also acknowledge that it is not a one time process. Making your organisation effective is something that you have to keep working at. Consequently, continuous improvement is essential if you are to become and remain an effective organisation. The question for you becomes; "What are the issues that I need to address to make my organisation more effective?"
A Starting Point
First of all though, let's discuss what it is that your effective organisation is going to deliver.
It is only possible to judge the effectiveness of an organisation if you know what it is supposed to be doing in the first place. Ultimately, effectiveness is measurable. It may be measurable in a general sense through, for example, profitability. A more effective organisation may realise better returns for its shareholders than a less effective one. It may, through benchmarking for example, be measurable in a more specific sense by comparing performance with other similar organisations. Organisation A may have higher productivity per employee, while organisation B may have higher customer approval ratings.
The point is that in order to compare and contrast, and to form judgements about effectiveness, we need to know what the organisation is supposed to deliver.
A Distinct Role - the Ideal Starting Point
Every organisation needs to have a clear and distinct role so that employees, customers, shareholders and the like can look at the organisation and understand what it is about. It follows that every part of an organisation must also have a distinct role to play. They provide their specific product or service to their customers, whether those customers are external to the organisation or in another part of the same organisation. If there is any doubt about the role of the whole or of part of your organisation, then that is where the effectiveness journey needs to start. Each part of an organisation needs to have that clear, distinct and essential role.
Trying to make the organisation effective by starting in each internal department and working to make it more effective is not the answer. You may indeed make that department more efficient, but to answer the effectiveness question you need to take the wider perspective. You need to be clear about why that department is there, what the service is that you want it to deliver, and why that department is necessary. In short, you need to define what it contributes to the whole. The issue is best summarised in a quote attributed to the American business guru Peter F Drucker; "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
The Next Step
Now is the time to test whether each part of your organisation has a clear, distinct and essential role. Start by asking the question of yourself. Then check it out with the others in the organisation. You can ask the stakeholders, and when you begin to get confident that you are on the right lines, you can ask your customers. Becoming an effective organisation is not a one week project!
by: Eric Thompson
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