Striving to Become a High Performance Organization

Today's extremely competitive and volatile corporate world is not meant for slow growing or inefficient organizations. It is now the aim of every organization, in both private and public sector, to create a high performance organization. This may be a relatively new concept but it is rapidly gaining popularity. A high performance organization is the one that can create a balance between performance, quality, customer relations and profitability. High performance organizations are thus defined as "groups of employees who produce desired goods or services at higher quality with the same or fewer resources. Their productivity and quality improve continuously, from day to day, week to week, and year to year, leading to the achievement of their mission.""

"If they can put a man on the moon, we can". That was the primary mission of the Apollo flights, as stated by NASA. For more than eight years, from the first day the idea was articulated until Neil Armstrong's first step on the lunar surface, there remained little doubt among NASA workers about what every meeting, every proposal, every budget discussion, every decision was ultimately intended to accomplish. For almost a decade, these seven words served as the guiding spirit, pointing the direction for everyone working in the space program. There was no magic in the moon. The magic was produced by providing a vision that others could comprehend and commit to. If your goal is to harness the energy of every member of your organization to develop an effective, high performing enterprise, then you must develop and articulate your purpose and direction. This is one of the most important responsibilities of top management. It helps ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. It's the first step toward high performance. High performance is virtually impossible unless everyone knows where the organization is going. Successful leaders accomplish this by creating a vision, developing a mission, and executing with values.

The working definition of a high-performance organization refers to having groups of employees who produce desired goods or services at higher quality with the same or fewer resources (Popovich, page 11). The organization wants the goods and services to be focused on making a great contribution to the overall mission; For instance, NASA's procurement office purchases goods and services that support the various center missions and the total NASA mission to explore and find life beyond. But procurement is not operating as a high-performance organization because 1) the relationship between people, their work, the organization, and the external environment is unclear. When all you see is your small piece of the overall task, where is the incentive to innovate.....? (Popovich, pg.25) High-performance organizations challenge the employee to relate their duties to the overall outcome to be achieved. As a contracts administrator who supports space and life sciences (the organization) I purchase plethora goods from dry ice to telescopes, to the construction of a facility that houses comet samples for the Genesis Mission. Because it has never been expressed how my procurements groups purchases are linked with other groups purchases and how all these goods and services acquired are utilized by the engineers and scientist who study, build, and design to come up with an end result that achieves NASA's mission my work feels routine. 2) Routine work is easy to teach and learn but no motivations for creativity exist. Better yet, not that creativity does not exist but is stifled due to status quo procedure. NASA procurement is nothing but procedure. There is a how-to checklist for the purchase order, the grant, the cooperative agreement, the small and large dollar contracts and no room for variation. Contracts administrators have done their work by the same checklist for years and some see no reason to change and those that do don't because of the bureaucratic "red tape". This monotony not only creates a sea of non-motivated workers but also is carried over in the service to customers. 3) Customers expect more and demand more....We are increasingly living in a world where goods can be produced, information exchanged, and services provided in a very short time...Customers demand the same level of service from the government.(Popovich, pg. 14). Customers demand the same level of service from government, so procurement's force of change should be the customer demand as well as new technologies. I say new technologies because it will improve the working process of contracts administrators which in turn will improve customer satisfaction by delivering in a shorter time. Work process can be transformed by new technologies in procurement. For example, instead of signing the first page of a contract, faxing that page and mailing the full document to the contractor utilize the online resources. The document is created in a template on the computer so why not use electronic signature and email. The contract gets to the contractor quicker and they begin services quicker because work cannot commence until the contract has been received and signed by the contracted party. Another example is online invoicing. The contractor is allowed to submit payroll reports, bimonthly reports, new technology reports online but must mail their invoices for payment which once received takes weeks to pay because it has to pass through a couple of channels before payment is approved. Why not have invoices submitted electronically and be reviewed and approved online for quicker pay out. This is exactly how it is done to fund contracts. The purchase requisition (PR) in created in a system that has four approval processes to go through all done online. If the money can be obligated electronically the payment can be approved electronically as well.

I totally agree that organizational culture facilitates or hampers reinvention. If you have a group of workers who have low morale, don't understand the mission or how what they do contributes to a mission they may be less apt to change and lack motivation. When an organization is functioning in a way that expresses a stagnant culture leadership is the key to improving performance and creating a more amenable organizational culture (Hennessey, pg. 523). Culture is the "personality" of the organization and a leader needs to have a clear vision for the personality of their organization and how to convey and implement the message. An organization's culture is a major determinant of organizational performance (Hennessey, pg. 522) therefore, it is important that leaders make consistent efforts to improve performance and how to improve performance is to define your mission and how you want your organization to think, act, interact with customers, and how the general operation is to be run. At