My son, Robert W. Yokl, VP of SVAH Solutions, sent me an article the other day from BBC Sports about the Mercedes Formula 1 racing team who won six consecutive championships on their “relentless pursuit of excellence.” More specifically, how Toto Wolff, head of Mercedes’s motorsport program, never stops pushing for even higher performance from his award-winning team. Here are four tips from Wolff that you too can use in your own pursuit of supply chain excellence:
- Brutal honesty with yourself: The only way to overcome mistakes and shortcomings is to be brutally honest with yourself. Otherwise, you will manufacture excuses to cover for your mistakes and shortcomings. Remember, excuses won’t bring you closer to the pursuit of being better tomorrow than you have been today.
- Transparency within your organization: Share all of your performance data (i.e., metrics, comparative, historical, etc.) with every level of your supply chain organization so your team members can see their progress or impediments to meeting their annual performance goals.
- Mindset of your team: Your team members must feel confident, capable, and courageous in their pursuit of excellence. It’s your job to instill these attributes into this mindset through never-ending training, coaching, and mentoring in their life and job skills.
- Find a new motivator each year: To climb to even greater heights than the year before, you will need to find a new motivator or nuance that will motivate and re-energize your team for another year, like targeting to win the Bellwether League’s “The Ammer Award” for supply chain operational performance.
The secret to the relentless pursuit of excellence, Wolff says, “is framing targets that keep motivation high throughout (your supply chain) organization.” These four tips will go a long way to helping you reach this aspirational goal each and every year.
Want to take a giant leap in your supply chain performance? Take a look at SVAH’s Value Analysis Tools today.