The Baseline of Excellence

I was working through a strategy plan for an organization and realized something quite simple yet often ignored in organizational culture... what do we measure ourselves on?

The predicament I observed is that we often we default to a scale that looks like this three stage model:

Poor - Status quo - Excellence

Now, I would imagine that most of us would agree that we desire to achieve excellence in our work, projects, programs, leadership, relationships, etc. But we fail to measure off the right index.

Most charters will begin with the baseline of excellence... this is where we hope to reach. But what happens is that as we grow there's a gap in leadership accountability and our baseline shifts from excellence to status quo and all of the sudden all our efforts begin looking great because of our baseline for measurement.

Lesser leadership will gravitate toward presentation of performance based on the status quo. Great leadership will always strive toward measurement on excellence. You can recognize this leadership in vision, challenge, hope, excitement, and engagement.

This is our challenge as leaders... to identify the core of excellence in our field (an ever changing goal) and draw our teams to this end. Much like Kouzes and Posner note in The Leadership Challenge, leaders must challenge the process.