Principles for service orgs

What does it mean to orient around services, or to be ‘service led’? Where do you start? How far should you go? These are common questions we get asked at The Service Org Group.

Today we’re excited to share 12 principles for service organisations that bring to life what it means to deliver better services - and to develop the conditions and culture to deliver better services.

These principles are based on our first hand research from 40+ companies and governments, as well as our own experience working with clients, and leading services in-house over the past 25+ years. The Service Organization book came out in 2023. It’s now a bestseller and The Service Org Group has supported dozens of organisations with advisory, training and coaching to be more service-oriented. 

How to see and monitor progress in being service-led

It’s hard to make progress if people don’t know where to start or what’s involved, or without knowing where your organisation is already, relative to others. Instead of every team spending time learning the same things, these 12 principles give a good foundation for making progress more rapidly.

Apply them to your own situations, use them to increase understanding, and to work out practical steps towards them. 

You don’t need to do everything at once. Choose one principle and make a start somewhere. Gather a group, and together identify some practical steps towards the principles that most closely match your priorities.

Benchmark to inspire rich conversations

You can score an organisation using each of the principles. A benchmark is interesting but the valuable part is in the high quality conversations it inspires. Why do individuals give a particular score or have different reasons for giving the same score? What’s in the way of other areas using more good practice from the one area that’s further along? How can more leaders understand their role in supporting everyone else to deliver better services?

Why we developed these principles

There are already very good models for digital maturity, calls to be mission-oriented, service standards, principles for designing services to work well for the people that need them, as well as plenty of leadership principles (here are Amazon’s). For the UK government there is a clear service standard and a view on what makes a public service ‘great’.

But there hasn’t been a good way to describe what it means to deliver better services, and at the same time, what it means for leaders to create the conditions to deliver better services.

We’ve been using these principles with our clients for some time. As with all useful things, they build on or are consistent with many existing good standards and principles.

Of course it’s not realistic for a single set of principles to capture everything, for every context. But we think this set could help you to communicate and to plan how to deliver better services and to create the conditions to deliver better services. 

Get support to use the principles

We offer a guided session on being service led for leadership groups, as well as support for in-house teams to strengthen service capability, grow confidence or accelerate progress.

These principles will continue to iterate as we gather more good examples. We’d love to hear from people doing the work, to know what else you’ve tried and what else was needed.