“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 a team whose members, even years later, will be remembered for what they accomplished. We want to go for greatness!

At FranklinCovey, our passion and mission is to enable greatness in people and organizations everywhere. And we have studied the topic of great performance at perhaps an unprecedented level. We have been privileged to work with thousands of organizations striving to achieve it. We have gone deep inside the operations of more than 500 of these organizations, examined and synthesized the data from more than 225,000 survey respondents, and worked with and analyzed 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 organizational greatness and what does and doesn’t matter in getting there. For example:

• The “strategic hand” dealt to great performers was not materially different from that dealt to good performers. Great performers simply did more with the hand they were dealt.

• There are pockets of great performance in every organization, and the great performers didn’t typically have more basic know-how than good performers. Great performers were simply much more successful at institutionalizing 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.

NEXT: What is Greatness?