Organizational Excellence

The Office of Organizational Excellence was created to assist the Executive Cabinet, Senior leadership and the LSS Board in moving Lutheran Social Services towards thinking and working as a performance management system; becoming more quality and performance-focused; process-oriented; and overall leaner. Championing this pursuit of excellence are Judy Bassett, vice president – community outreach services and organizational excellence, and Ginnie Rudisill – human resources generalist and organizational excellence coordinator, who will provide leadership to organizational excellence. Together, they have combined experience in quality and performance management and improvement, planning and evaluation, problem solving, human resources issues, assessment methods and training.

The effort will focus on building capacity within LSS for future facilitation, process management, measurement & analysis and leadership training. Through organizational excellence (OE) LSS will facilitate organization-wide quality management and improvement activities built upon the framework of the Baldrige Criteria for Organizational Performance Excellence and which utilize the tools and techniques of quality and process management.

The major goals of OE are:

• Improve the quality of services for all those we serve.
• Assist in the facilitation for planning, assessing processes, educating employees and building capacity within LSS.
• Provide the Executive Cabinet, Senior Leadership and the LSS Board of Directors with valid and reliable outcome data that can guide policies, decision-making and priority setting.

Now you may ask, what does this all mean in layman’s terms?

According to Bassett, “This is a journey that we are going to take together to identify and continually improve the way we provide service so we can deliver better value to our patients and clients. If we all commit to this new mindset, we will improve our overall operational performance and LSS will become a recognized, high-performing leader in our three core service areas – senior living, community outreach services and community health services.”

Bassett went on to further state that LSS is changing management practices from a traditional management style to an organizational performance management model. “It’s about moving from managing people to leaders managing processes”, she explained. “We need to focus on our customers and strategic planning. We need to emphasize our strengths and acknowledge that everyone in the agency will contribute something of value that can help us move in the right direction. We need to work in teams and push decision-making to the lowest possible level; empowering our employees on the first line to lead our teams.”

“The first few years will be a learning curve for everyone,” said Rudisill. “We plan to conduct a baseline assessment of employee’s perceptions and understanding of quality, explain what organizational excellence is and begin educating our employees in the various techniques and tools. It will require a change in mindset with how we accomplish our responsibilities. By challenging our thought process it will help us better meet the needs of those we serve, achieve accreditation and transform into a high-performing organization.”

Organizational Excellence Expectations

As I began to wrap my head around what organizational excellence is, it boiled down to a couple of simple thoughts. For me organizational excellence means that we do the right thing and we do it to the best of our abilities. It means looking at any issue and, not just solving the issue, but looking deeper to see why it happened and how we ensure that it does not happen again. It means fixing what we do not do well and, just as importantly, doing better what we do well. It means that we are all, individually and collectively, responsible for the outcome of what we do because we are in partnership with each other – a partnership that must be based on trust and respect. Our success will be celebrated by all of us and our shortcoming will be all of ours to fix.

As we move forward with this initiative at Lutheran Social Services there will be meetings and surveys and charts which will allow us to measure how we are doing on this journey. However, for me, the real measure will be the stories of what impact it has had on how we go about our work. The true measurement will not be a state survey or the outcome of a grant award, but the ability of each of us to put our head on the pillow knowing that we did all that we could, the best that we could.

I have encouraged our staff to not pass this off as another silly initiative sent down from management because it can’t be a top down initiative. It must be from bottom to top, a priority for everyone that chooses to work at LSS. I have asked just two things from everyone as we move forward; commit to doing the right thing well, no shortcuts, and as you see things that we can do better, don’t be silent. The only wrong is not doing what is right.

Robert L. Rundle
President & CEO
Lutheran Social Services