Excellence Is A Choice

Jon Gordon recently interviewed Horst Schulze, a cofounder of The Ritz Carlton Hotel company.  Horst is a legendary leader and visionary who has helped reshape the concepts of excellence, service, and competitive advantage, transcending divisions of industry across the world. 

Horst had a couple of very great quotes about excellence and how leadership differs from management.

Horst says that excellence is a choice:

Excellence is a choice.  If you do things with excellence, you are going to win.  Excellence is a decision.  It is not an accident.  It is the result of high intentions, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.  It's not by chance, its a choice, and it directs your destiny.  If you are excellent or not is a choice that you make.  Everything is a decision in life.

When he was asked what he has learned about leadership, he said:

There are very few leaders, but a lot of managers.  There is a difference between leadership and management.  Exceptional managers study their customers, what they want, what they expect, what they desire from you, and you will make sure that your employees know what your customers want, and you will create processes, systems, and controls that make sure you employees do what your customers want. 

If you are a great leader, you will create an environment in which your employees want to do what your customers want.  At the same time, your employees know and are a part of your company.  They don't just work for the company, they are a part of the company.  They are there for a purpose, which is to create excellence.  That is leadership.  It implies that you are leading people somewhere, to a destination.  Companies talk about leadership, but their people don't know the destination or the purpose of the company.  You can't lead unless everybody knows where you are leading too.

He talked about how he gets excellence out of his employees.  He says it starts in the hiring process and from the first time that he trains them, and it is something that they talk about everyday.  He doesn't call it the hiring process, but the selection process, and when they are ready to select a new employee, they ask if they are willing and ready to join a company that strives for excellence and to be the best in the world at what they do.

Horst says that you need people who will join you in this ambition, and if you can hire better people than your competition, you will win.  He tells future employees, "Don't join us if you can't join our dream and vision."

How do we hire better people?  The most important job that we have is hiring the best people that we can hire.

Give them a why and then explain to them the how.
Horst talks about how important it is to merge the vision of the company with the vision of every individual employee.  The objectives of the employees have to match the objectives of the team.  When the team is successful, the team earns respect and when the team earns respect, the employees earn respect; everybody is working for the same thing.  Its the leaders responsibility to identify the vision and to communicate it in a way that the employees want to buy-in and live it.  The leader has to have the dream and sell the dream and show each employee how the dream will benefit them.

Horst has identified 20 things that seperates his company from the competition, and what have to do to achieve excellence.  They teach those 20 things during the first trainings, and they repeat one of them every day so that they sustain excellence.  He says that this is how they become the best and stay the best.