HKSQ Seminar on Building a Culture of Service Excellence

We are honor to invite Mr. Kitson Leonard Lee who is Honorary Secretary of Singapore Quality Institute (SQI) and Senior Consultant/Facilitator with aAdvantage Consulting Group in Singapore to be our guest speaker to give us a talk named "Building a Culture of Service Excellence" on 23 Dec 2013. I would like to summarize the seminar for sharing below.

In the beginning, Mr. Kitson Leonard Lee briefed some concept on what culture was and the importance of culture within the organization. Then he initiated group discussion for current culture and we were separated into four groups with different discussion topics included Long Hours, Short-Term Focus, Profit, Financial Stability, Teamwork, Open Communication, Bureaucracy and Control, etc.

We discussed both positive and/or negative impacts on such culture / behave within the organization and presented group by group.

Then Kitson mentioned the culture of organization was a refection of the values and beliefs of the current leaders. So cultural transformation began with the personal transformation of the leaders. Kitson said the best way begin was by mesuring the culture of your organization and then he introduced the assessment tool called "Cultural Values Assessment (CVA)" or "Leadership Values Assessments (LVA)". A video about Barrett's 7 Level of Consciousness was showed which was developed from Maslow's Needs to Barrett's Consciousness.

Some examples about similar organizations with different cultures using CVA to analysis were discussed. L implied potential Limit value.

Finally, Kitson explained how to transfer the CVA result into action through the 6 steps circle that were "1 - Values Assessment", "2 - Share Results and Start Dialogue", "3 - Prioritize Key Focus Values", "4 - Explore Key Values and Behaviours", "5 - Create Culture Development Plan" and "6 - Live the Values and Grow the Desired Culture".

Q&A session
During Q&A, I asked about Culture Entropy which was difficult to change the trend of existing culture (See my previous article using Newton's law: Law of Organizational Motion)

Mr. Peter Fung (Vice Chairman, HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Mr. Kitson Lee.

Mr. Kitson Lee (Honorary Secretary, SQI) also presented a souvenir to us.

HKSQ exco members took a group photo with SQI speaker and exco members.
(Left: Ricky Suen, Lotto Lai, James Lee (Exco member, SQI), Kitson Lee, Peter Fung and Albert Tsang)

We had dinner with Kitson's family afterwards.

Reference:
HKSQ – http://www.hksq.org/
SQI – http://www.sqi.org.sg/
Cultural Values Assessment (CVA) – http://www.valuescentre.com/products__services/?sec=cultural_values_assessment_(cva)
Barrett Seven Levels and Cultural Transformation Tools - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snnSXykwUag

Related HKSQ activities:
HKSQ Study Mission for Service Quality Management in Singapore (Part 1)
HKSQ Study Mission for Service Quality Management in Singapore (Part 2)