What do you think should be an organization’s priority to achieve excellence: its processes, or its people? Why? How do the two relate and interact?

 Organizational excellence is the ongoing efforts to establish an internal framework of standards and processes intended to engage and motivate employees to deliver products and services that fulfill customer requirements within business expectations(ASQ, 2022). Organizational excellence continues the progress established by a foundation such as total quality management, in which all levels of the organization participate in continual improvement(ASQ, 2022).

Processes are crucial components of how a company operates and delivers value to its customers. However, back to where an organization was founded, there are always a leader(or leaders) and a team(or multiple teams). Leaders share their vision and motivate the team to construct it. After that, leaders keep focusing on the vision and motivation, and those teams are focusing on operations and monitoring the results. These teams follow the vision and mission to design the processes and keep them effective. If the vision is to land on the moon, the team will design and build a rocket and hire astronauts to accomplish the mission. If the vision is to be a coffee chain like Starbuck, the team will start to hire baristas and find suitable places to operate. Then, at every stage of the progress, the employees carry out each process and see to it that everything is done properly. Employees implement the vision and goals created and motivated by the leaders and the whole organization.

I believe people are one of the most important elements when it comes to an organization that functions effectively. An organization is only as good as its employees. To achieve consistently superior performance such as outputs that exceed meeting objectives, needs, or expectations, the original source of this motivation I think, is people. Processes are like the laws and rules. They are designed and executed by people to meet certain expectations, objectives, and needs. Even though we are using AI nowadays, it is still "Artificial" intelligence. That doesn't mean that the processes are not important at all. The computer and the program are there to assist us and we can keep them upgraded. They are somewhat interdependent. Feed the probiotics that live in your body and they will contribute to your health. If a company already has excellent processes but does not have good employees, those processes are hard to be effective. Likewise, if a company has talented employees but does not have good processes in place, the skills of the employees would go to waste.

Reference

What is organizational excellence? ASQ. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://asq.org/quality-resources/organizational-excellence