“Good” may be good enough for some. But most of us want more than that. Something inside us makes us want to be better than good. We want to be part of an enterprise, a team whose members, even years later, will be remembered for what they accomplished. We want to go for greatness!

At FranklinCovey Southern Africa, our passion and mission is to enable greatness in people and organisations. With offices in more than 147 countries, conducting business in more than 30 languages, the FranklinCovey global network has been privileged to work with thousands of organisations. We have studied the topic of great performance at perhaps an unprecedented level.
We have gone deep inside the operations of more than 500 of these organisations, examined and synthesized the data from more than 225,000 survey respondents, and worked with and analysed more than 2,000 work teams. We wanted to understand what constitutes great performance, what gets in the way of it, what conditions are necessary for it, and what a leader’s role is in achieving it.

As a result, we have learned a lot about the topic of organisational greatness and what does and doesn’t matter in getting there. For example:

• Environmental factors for conducting business for great performers were not materially different from that of good performers. Great performers simply did more with what they had.

• There are pockets of great performance in every organisation, and the great performers didn’t typically have more basic know-how than good performers. Great performers were simply much more successful at institutionalising what they did know. They were better at execution, better at reducing inconsistency and getting the middle 60 percent of their operations - their core performers - to operate at levels much closer to that of their top performers.