“A Culture of Excellence: The Art, Discipline, and Practice of Breakthrough Leadership” is a book that focuses on the pivotal qualities of leadership needed to foster a positive culture and drive success within your organization. In part 3 of a 10 part radio interview series discussing the book, Dr. Fardad Fateri, defines excellence and speaks to values that help shape a culture of excellence.
Transcript:
welcome back again this is the inner
voice and I'm doctor Foojan and I'm
delighted to have dr. Fardad Fateri
who's the president and the CEO of
International Education Corporation
which owns and operates accredited
college across colleges across the
United States he is the author of a
culture of excellence the art discipline
and practice of breakthrough leadership
dr. Fateri is a part of a small group
of chief executives in American higher
education today with significant
experience in the imperative but rare
interwoven triad of academic operations
and business verticals with over 25
years of experience in higher education
and graduating from UC Irvine and
Harvard University's dr. Fateri has
served as a professor department chair
Dean regional director college president
division president chief academic
officer for director and presidency of
several medium to large-sized nonprofit
market funded and privately held systems
and we have him with us now welcome dr.
Fateri thank you so much thank you
for the invitation happy to be here
wonderful now you talked about the
culture of excellence so two things that
I would like to request from you one
define excellence because I think
everybody has their own version of what
excellence yes and then if you can tell
us what values have you come across
through all the 25 years of experience
to have been in other organizations
nonprofit organizations and profitable
organization and education what types of
values you've seen that it brings the
culture of excellence oh that's
excellent that's an excellent question
to me excellence means having a standard
method of ensuring success for your
customers so whenever you're set
customers are successful and and that
means you have reached excellence and
whenever you
exceed expectations consistently in our
cases with students if we if we achieved
success consistently from location to
location student to student program to
program over a period of time that to me
is is is achieving excellence and and
and the way I define excellence is
consistency everybody can be fantastic
once or twice but when you consistently
perform duties that produce successful
results that means you have achieved
consistency so to me consistency is the
mother of excellence in in in whatever
organization that exists now to address
your second question about what values
are important you know there are
thousands of values that various
organizations have and I can't say five
or ten or better than the other 1
million it just all depends on the
organization and what values they hold
dear and what values work for them for
us what has really been very very
productive and and the values that have
produced results for us are values that
empower people our colleagues because if
they're successful our students are
successful it empowers them to become
the CEOs of their position you know I
have the title of CEO but I consider
every member of our community at all of
our sites to also be the CEOs of their
positions regardless after title or
position or job description we empower
every single employee to truly be in
charge of everything that they that they
do we empower them to make decisions we
empower them to take action
we are completely ok with people making
mistakes but we want them to own what
they do if they make mistakes it's ok as
long as they say we've made a mistake
we move forward I think a lot of times
many organizations focus on whom who did
it who made the mistake and who's
responsible so they can fire the person
more so than they are in finding
solutions to difficult problems we on
the other hand focus a lot on finding
the problem making that 10% of the
entire continuum but spending 90 percent
on finding solutions to problems and if
you can imagine if all of the employees
of an organization feeling empowered to
own their positions and making decisions
on every day to serve the customer you
can imagine how powerful the
organization could become as opposed to
an organization that expects its
managers and leaders to continuously on
a daily basis tell people what to do I'm
hearing you saying that a culture of
interdependency not a dependent group of
people who are only looking at the high
above to dictate to them everything or
for the leadership on top or executive
management to actually assume that
they're gonna micromanage every aspect
not allowing the ownership for that and
your value system of every person take
on the culture of being a CEO of your
position taking ownership accountability
taking the responsibility of
communicating their expectation and the
need of your whole team the concept of
the team and everybody is the team dr.
Fardad Fateri who has created and it's
an e-book a culture of excellence the
art discipline and the practice of
breakthrough leadership dr. Farr theory
where can people we'll get your book
actually the book is also sold in
paperback it is available in digital
format
my co-author James York and I very
excited to have that
Amazon is probably the fastest and most
accessible way to the book
About the Author: Fardad Fateri
Dedicated to the advancement of student success, leadership development, and organizational excellence, Dr. Fardad Fateri has devoted his 30-year career to catalyzing innovation and transformation in American higher education.
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