Post by ASQ Human Development and Leadership Division

Excerpt from an article I recently wrote: Transformational Operating Model: Moving from Operational to Organizational Excellence. Organizational Development has long focused on leadership, culture, learning, and talent strategy, while Operational Excellence has focused on process, quality, and efficiency. Achieving true Organizational Excellence requires rethinking that separation and intentionally redesigning the organizational operating model that governs how people lead, learn, and improve work. Organizational Excellence is often described as an organization’s ability to achieve sustained results by aligning purpose, principles, people, and processes in ways that enable continuous improvement and long-term performance. Lean practitioners may recognize this orientation in frameworks such as those advanced by the Shingo Institute, where excellence is understood not as a set of tools, but as a system of behaviors embedded in how the organization operates. This perspective reinforces the central premise of a Transformational Operating Model. Organizational Excellence does not emerge from isolated initiatives or technical improvements alone. It is shaped by how leadership capability, learning systems, and operational processes are intentionally designed to reinforce one another. When Operational Excellence efforts focus solely on process optimization, and Organizational Development efforts focus solely on people systems, organizations limit their ability to sustain excellence. A transformational operating model closes that gap by integrating Lean and quality improvement with capability development, ensuring leaders and teams build the skills, behaviors, and habits required to operate with excellence over time. In this model, Lean is no longer an operational activity layered on top of the organization. It becomes a leadership practice, a learning mechanism, and a core way of working, supported by OD frameworks that embed excellence into how the organization operates. From a quality perspective, this integration is essential. Lean and quality efforts are ultimately shaped by the organizational design, leadership behaviors, and systems that surround them, areas where OD frameworks provide critical structure and reinforcement. One example of this integration is the ASQ Human Development and Leadership Technical Community Leadership Development Competency Framework, which recognizes leadership capability, change, learning, and people development as essential enablers of sustained performance. Because excellence is not sustained by discipline alone. It is sustained by design. Please share your perspectives in the comments! Dr. Mary Kay Taylor, MBA Chair, Human Development & Leadership Technical Community