To what extent are you prepared to:

1. Invest a substantial amount of personal and organizational time over a 3- to 5-year period in service/quality improvement?		______
2. Hold line managers accountable for service/ quality improvement as much as for financial results?		______
3. Regularly review and reinforce service/quality improvement efforts?		______
4. Commit the financial and human resources needed for a full deployment?		______
5. Integrate improvement efforts with current strategic and financial planning?		______
6. Revise or replace personal habits or organizational systems and processes that hinder service/quality improvement?		______
7. Bring employee teams heavily into the improvement planning and implementation process?		______
8. Invest a minimum of 10 to 12 days per year in your own continuous education, learning, and skill development?		______
9. Seek continuous feedback on how well you are perceived to be signaling your service/quality vision and core values?		______
10. Ensure that coordinators and facilitators/ trainers have plenty of training and highly visible support?		______
11. Personally lead steering committees, process and project improvement teams, become a trainer, and use data-based tools and techniques in decision making?		______
12. Maintain a steady and continuous stream of education and awareness across the whole organization?		______

Total Score:

______

If your score was between 46 and 55 points, you need to be cautious. There may not be enough commitment to take your organization through the long haul. A frank discussion of what is holding back full-scale commitment is needed.

Range of executive commitment:

1. Permission

This allows managers or staff support people to proceed as long as it doesn't cost too much and disrupt the "real business."

2. Lip service

This level of commitment gives speeches and writes memos exhorting everyone to improve service/quality. Some budgets and resources are allocated to a piecemeal series of improvement programs. There is no strategic service/quality improvement plan, the process is not part of operational management's responsibilities, and the executive is not personally involved in education or training.

3. Passionate lip service

The executive attends an abbreviated overview of the training being given to everyone else. Some elements of a deployment process are shakily in place. Passionate stump speeches urge everyone to "get going."

4. Involved leadership

The executive attends all training first in its entirety then gets trained to deliver the introductory education and awareness and skill-development sessions. Service/quality improvement is the first item on all meeting agendas and priority lists. Managers are held accountable and rewarded for their contributions to continuous improvement. The executive group leads the process management process. There is a strong and comprehensive deployment process - infrastructure, planning and reporting, and assigned responsibilities - in place.

5. Strategic service/quality leadership

Day-to-day operating decisions have been delegated to the myriad of increasingly autonomous improvement teams. The majority of the executive's time is spent with customers, suppliers, teams, and managers gathering input for long-term direction and "managing the organization's context" by providing meaning through the vision and values.

Reprinted with permission of The CLEMMER Group and Jim Clemmer (www.clemmer.net/speaking/speakjim.shtml). Jim is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and workshop/retreat leader. Over 200 or his columns and articles are available at www.clemmer.net/articles.shtml. The CLEMMER Group (www.clemmer.net) is a management consulting firm specializing in organization, team, and personal transformation. The firm provides strategic consulting, performance assessments, improvement/implementation planning, action-based learning workshops, and executive coaching to accelerate organization improvement.