Developing The Best Practice Habits

Some of the best innovators in the world today are borrowers. Intel borrowed marketing techniques to sell computer chips like potato chips. Chapparal Steel, one of the new breed of successful steel mini mills, discovered ideas about better ways to produce molds for casting from Mexican company. A large hospital system sent administrators and Physicians to Disney World to learn about guest relations. Japan modeled its post office on Great Britain’s. Singapore government routinely sends delegations to study how the best private and public sector organizations handle new issues. 

Little wonder Robert Saldich CEO OF Raychem, instituted a not invented here award for the person or group that adapted a new idea from somewhere else.

All great borrowers or perhaps all visionary leaders know the best practice secret. Stretching to learn from the best of the best in any sector can make a big vision more likely to succeed.

Of course reaching for excellence requires being able to recognize what excellence is. High performance opens their minds to new ideas, challenge their assumptions and scrutinize their performance practice by practice.  

This kind of rapid adaptation is essential in a global information economy that seems to draw curve balls as often as winning pitches, one that brings error along with technology. Organizations and leaders must be adept at learning, adept at change, and always striving to perform at their peak.

Why Best Practice?

The idea behind best practice is a simple concept: measurable standards. The idea of benchmarking started pragmatically from yardsticks to business management. In the 80s Xerox which desperately needed improvement brought the idea of competitive benchmarking from Japan to United States, somewhere along the way, absolute standard such as zero defects became the relative standards – who is doing the best job of reducing defects? Best became better or in some cases, simply good enough.

The performance of anything, product line, a business unit, a hospital, a school, or a sport team can be measured against three different standards: Past performance, Peer performance or potential performance. Think about the differences in terms of how much learning and change occurs.

For starters, you can measure performance against the past, against your own record, if the trend is up, you feel pretty buoyant. You will decide to keep going with it. Not much learning there. If the trend is down, you feel dissatisfied. You look for something to blame or you vow to do better. The emphasis is on what went wrong and how to fix it. Not much learning there either.

You can go one step further and start looking outside your own experience to performance against peers. How are you doing compare to your competitors? If you are beating them good, look no further. If you are behind, work harder to catch up. Sometimes not always you decide to learn from them. Peer comparison emphasizes getting ahead, not achieving excellence.

Most businesses, indeed most people are content with the first two kinds of assessments, against the past and against peers. Am better off than I was five year ago, is my team winning. But that is not enough to lay the foundation for success in a world of rapid change, of demanding competition, of new technologies, of empowered customers and consumers. Looking backward or looking at peers doesn’t provide sufficient impetus for finding better approaches.

Leaders who want to achieve sustained successes reach for a higher standard. They want to be not just good or better but the very best. They imagine greater height to be attained. They envision an even better world and encourage themselves and others to achieve it. They use best practices to challenge themselves in a third way.

This third way to measure performance is against potential, against all that could be achieved, against all that is possible.  The CEO of a food company wanted more innovation and bigger ideas because he saw people settling for small gains and small profits when total market size was so much bigger. His company had increased sales by 15% in the last year, which the product manager reported proudly, but a small previously ignored competitor was up 50% and had sales volume three times as high as the food giant. To the CEO, the measurement system that rewarded people for small gains and hitting their targets, and benchmarked only against similar peers, stifled innovation and restricted growth. To the CEO, settling for good enough is not good enough.

It is not only business leaders that see the need to reach for higher standards. Donald Berwick, founder for the institute for healthcare improvement, had focused his advocacy for many years on improving quality and reducing errors. Recently, he charted a new course and set a new standard: the pursuit of perfection. He wants every single encounter with the healthcare system to be as good as it can possibly be.

Perfection! How many CEOs urge their people to set such a high aspiration? Instead, many companies settle for less than they could achieve. The search for excellence goes beyond marketplace goals to cover every aspects of an organization’s performance, process by process, practice by fine-grained practice. The corporate ethics scandals in Nigeria raises questions of relative (everybody else is doing it) versus absolute standards. If you have reduced accounting errors to below industry average, is that good enough, or is there a higher standard for financial reporting? Embracing best practice, not just better practices, leads companies to set new standards and come closer to full potentials, if not perfection.

The decision to go for the best practices has to be grounded in reality and informed by priorities. An organization can’t necessarily be best at everything without exorbitant cost. Sometimes excellence on everything is not worth it.

The challenge is acting on higher standards. High aspirations must be translated into high performance. Standard setting leadership at the top must be reflected in standard actualizing behavior throughout the organization.

Communities of Best Practices: Everyone is a Professional

High-performing, change-adept organizations makes striving for excellence a way of life, embedded in organizational culture. They do this by trying to turn everyone, at every level, into a professional.

Medicine, Law, engineering and many other high skill professions are widely regarded as beacons of best practices. But why stop there? Why can’t other workers strive to be the best in class, whatever form their contributions take? ServiceMaster, a contractor for hospital porters, turn low skill tasks into professional jobs, developing the best wall scrubbers and the best floor cleaners, characterized by carefully researched disciplines, excellent tools, abundant training and a sense of professional pride on the part of the people who feel that they too are contributing to the medical mission.

Professionals are known by their knowledge. All professionals act on their gut instincts and exercise judgment, but they do it based on a thorough grounding in best practices. Armed with the best practice knowledge, anyone and everyone can act like a professional, exhibiting the key characteristics that distinguish mere amateurs from committed professionals.

Characteristics of Best Practices:

• High Performance Standards
• Mastery of common ways of doing things that meet those standards
• Belief in a mission apart from financial success
• Career progress through an increase in skills and the respect of peers
• A shared language and knowledge base
• Participation in networks and event to exchange knowledge
• Self-management and autonomous decision on the job
• Peer review of performance

In an information economy populated by knowledge workers, organizations run less like hierarchies and more like communities of practice, knit together by professional standards. If people are treated like empowered professionals, they do not wait to be told what to do, they just do it. This changes the work of managers. To restate a cliché, managers must become leaders; they must be engage in coaching, teaching people how to do the job autonomously, how to exercise judgments, and how to customize solutions for unique customers or clients. In short, they guide people not through rules and over the shoulder supervision but through knowledge of standards.

Think of this as a new kind of control system, one emanating from identification and dissemination of best practices. It guides empowered individuals towards achieving organizational aims through shared values, standards, and priorities. People are informed about how their tasks fit into overall goals and strategy, so that they can contribute to alignment. They get ongoing process measures and feedback given directly to people to help them judge and guide their own performance. Professional rewards, recognition and future opportunities build commitment. And of course, systematic transfer of best practice help people to learn from what works elsewhere.

Professionalism requires continuous upgrading of skills. It has become fashionable for companies to articulate a desire to become a learning organization. But sometimes they fail in practice because of under-investment in learning, coupled with that other legacy of large bureaucracies, the politics of rank. More senior hierarchical positions often allow managers to surround themselves with sycophants and flatterers or to insulate themselves from challenge and criticism.

Conclusively, professionalism is a dynamic capability that produces its own demand. Once people have been treated like professionals and have been encouraged to use their judgment, they want more of this treatment. Once people have earned the respect of peers by staying at the cutting edge, they recognized that they must continue to learn about the newest and best, or that respect will erode. Standards thus continue to rise, generating demand for still more knowledge of new development and best practices.

Refs: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Getting the Best from Best Practices