To Be the Best By Any Measure: Creating and Sustaining a High Performance Organization

By Pat Magee and Marie F. Jones

A Proven Approach to Transform your Business into a High Performance Organization

Pat Magee developed a formula to bring new life to struggling businesses. He demonstrates that a vibrant business requires:
A Healthy Organizational CultureOngoing Leadership DevelopmentComprehensive Strategic Planning
These lead to what Magee refers to as a "High Performance Organization." How do you get there? What does it really take to assess and adjust your current business practices so that you can rise to the top?

Through these pages, Pat answers those questions as he guides, helps, and encourages readers to reach their full potential and do extraordinary things.

This unique approach is proven to breathe fresh life into businesses and nonprofit organizations.

What Readers are Saying:

"A valuable owner-manager guide to organization leadership and better management. ... A central part of any manager' s library." Former CEO

"Recommended, if not required, reading for all aspiring Business students." Former Business School Mentee

"An informative, authoritative, conversational, and entertaining book. The reader can effectively learn and apply these lessons and start making positive changes to their organization today." Current Business Student

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781611535242

Book preview

Dedication

For my wife

with sincere appreciation

for her continuing love and support

through the many moves

of our 50+ year journey

together.

k

To Pat, my co-author,

whose boundless energy

inspires me daily.

Thank you for sharing

this adventure with me

Introduction

by Pat Magee

This is the story of how I started as a manager and became an effective leader and team builder, working with a variety of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and college students. As a result of my varied educational, military, and early professional experiences, I realized that a High Performance Organization is created and sustained on the solid foundation of leadership development, a comprehensive strategic plan, and a healthy organizational culture. I also realized that it really makes no difference what the organization does, making a product or performing a service, or how big or how small it is; the essential elements remain the same.

Only when an organization has reached a sustainable level of High Performance can its leadership realistically pursue a vision of the future. My vision for each organization I served was: To Be the Best by Any Measure. I want to share that vision with you, my reader.

During my career, I served as president and general manager of four different manufacturing companies, leaving each in a better situation than when I started. At the same time, I was actively involved in several nonprofit organizations and always made my family my first priority.

When people ask, What did you actually do? I tell them, I was in the leadership development and team building business. Why? Because that is what was absolutely necessary to salvage and revitalize stagnant and struggling companies.

I learned that building and leading a High Performance organization is like making a reliable three-legged stool. Each of the legs represents one of the elements of success.

Figure 1: The Three-Legged Magee Stool

Each of the three legs of the Magee Stool represents one element necessary to build and sustain a High Performance Organization:

Organizational Culture

Leadership Development

Strategic Planning

Notice that the rungs of the stool connect each leg to the two other legs. All three must work together to support the seat, which represents the High Performance Organization. If any of the legs or rungs are missing, broken, or underperforming, the organization cannot reach its full potential, and the seat will collapse. It is just so with a High Performance Organization. The interconnected elements of organizational culture, leadership development, and strategic planning support the organization and make it truly high performing.

In order for any organization to prosper and succeed in the long run, leadership must focus on and potentially change their culture, develop strong leaders (not just managers) at all levels of the organization, and create, implement, and continually update a comprehensive strategic plan.

Organizational Culture

Research and practice demonstrate that an organi­zation’s culture can have a significant impact on its long-term performance and success. The guiding principles shared by all members of an organization define its culture. As you read, consider the following questions about your own organization:

What is your organization’s culture?

Is it healthy?

Is it still evolving?

Are there opportunities to improve upon it?

In subsequent chapters, we will discuss organizational culture and the characteristics of healthy and unhealthy cultures. You will see the need for effective leaders to become cultural change agents and their importance in defining the desired culture in the development of a comprehensive strategic plan. We will walk you through assessing and changing your culture and the barriers to change you may encounter.

Leadership Development

As you read the following chapters, you will discover what is absolutely necessary to build a stool with lasting durability and strength. That requires effective leadership at all levels of the organization, not just the top. It is necessary to have many leaders in order to communicate the vision and the desired values and norms of behavior, implement the strategic plan, and ultimately sustain the High Performance Organization.

Leadership development is essential for an organization to achieve long-term success. How do you create that multi-leveled leadership? This book provides key insights to help you identify potential leaders. We will discuss the characteristics of these individuals, along with their roles and responsibilities. More importantly, we’ll explore how effective leaders are different from managers, supervisors, and even presidents.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a coordinated and systematic process to assure that the overall course and direction of the organization are well thought out, sound, and appropriate. The planning process also optimizes future potential as it sharply focuses resources in support of the plan. Overall, strategic planning is the rational determination of where the organization is, where its members desire it to go, and how it should get there. The Strategic Plan becomes the roadmap for achieving and sustaining the High Performance Organization.

High Performance Organizations

While attaining High Performance is a necessary objective, sustaining that level of performance requires ongoing attention to culture, leadership, and planning. Sustaining High Performance is imperative in the pursuit of the vision To Be the Best by Any Measure.

We will discuss High Performance Organizations, what is needed, how they differ from other organizations, and how they are sustained. We will see that in these organizations:

Managers become Leaders

Committees become Teams

Employees or Volunteers become Team Members

Problems become Opportunities

Vision: To Be the Best by Any Measure

The vision for an organization must involve a pursuit beyond the Magee Stool. It is the overarching concept a leader envisions for the organization, always on the horizon, waiting to be realized. Unlike a mission statement that describes an organization as it is, a vision statement communicates to everyone what an organization ultimately strives to become. To create real change in an organization, a leader must have a vision for that change. That vision will be the rallying cry and the roadmap for the future.

An organization that has reached a level of High Performance with a healthy culture, leadership development, and a comprehensive strategic plan must continuously improve. They must take on new challenges, set and accomplish new goals, and always keep their eye on the horizon.

As you read and digest the content of this book, we encourage you to apply what you have learned to build and sustain your own High Performance Organization, always pursuing the loftiest vision of what you and your organization aspire to be.

Chapter One

Meet Pat Magee

Leaders are not born and not made.

They are born to be made.

—Pat Magee

Pat and I met by chance in the cafeteria of the small college where I teach leadership. He was volunteering in one of his many mentoring projects, this time a resume-writing event. As I wandered past, he introduced himself, gave me his card, and let me know that he enjoys guest lecturing in business classes. My leadership class was a perfect opportunity to share his experience with another group of students.

I didn’t take him up on his offer for that semester, but we met again during the summer as I put together my fall class. Pat brought a pile of PowerPoint slides and a charisma I couldn’t resist. Clearly, he would be a lively and informative guest speaker. He had turned his experience into more than just a self-serving biography. His three-legged stool model fits perfectly with the leadership theories I teach.

We talked for a couple of hours that day. He told me more about his experience revitalizing manufacturing companies and mentoring future leaders. During that conversation, it became clear that his knowledge encompassed much more than a simple lecture or two. He loves to share his expertise to help young leaders grow. We talked about the mentoring programs he worked with on campus and lecture series options for the community. How could he expand his mentoring role to a broader audience? Together, we realized that this framework and his experiences would make a great book. Getting it in print would allow him to help people far beyond our small community. And so we began to write The Best by Any Measure.

Early Life

Pat is a learner, even at what he calls his super-senior age. Each of his life experiences has informed the next, and he continues to learn daily. Pat was adopted when he was only three days old; his younger brother was adopted at age four when Pat was eight. A decade earlier, their adoptive parents had suffered through the Great Depression. They had no children of their own, but each came from a large family of ten children. They were caring, encouraging, and supportive parents who helped Pat grow to be balanced and self-sufficient.

His was a relatively unremarkable middle-class childhood in Middle America, filled with activities like Cub Scouts and Little League, band, choir, and the baseball team. Pat enjoyed academics, particularly math and science, and graduated near the top of his high school class. He avoided cliques and got along with everyone. He worked in his parents’ large garden and learned the value of hard work.

College and Graduate School

Like many young people, Pat’s primary goal after high school was to get out on his own, far from home. He considered studying veterinary science or law and began his college career at Wabash College, a small all-male liberal arts college in Indiana. He started college with his savings and a small contribution from his parents. He did well that first year, but without scholarships or financial aid for the next year at Wabash, he returned to his home state and attended Iowa State University at a fraction of the cost. Working summers and part-time jobs on campus, he put himself through school for the next four years to graduate with a B.S. in Engineering.

While excelling academically, Pat held a variety of leadership roles on campus, and he encourages the students he mentors today to do the same. Among other activities, he served as president of his fraternity and co-chair of two of the biggest events on campus, Homecoming week and Greek week.

Even as a young man, Pat could envision change and make it happen through team building and collaboration. He tells the story of working with a team of other top students to organize a service event for the campus. For years, they had blood drives, but Pat envisioned something new.

We’ll call it ‘Operation Boxcar,’ he said. "We’ll find an organization that collects clothes for needy people, organize