A few years ago, I developed something internally at DCC that I thought was pretty straightforward.

Three definitions.

Effective. Efficient. Excellent.

We came to call them DCC’s Three E’s: internal guideposts for how we approach our work.

Effective meant creating meaningful impact.

Efficient meant moving with disciplined focus and peaceful urgency.

Excellent meant delivering high-quality work with rigor, integrity, and intentionality.

That was it. And for a while, I thought that was enough. This year, I realized it wasn't. Because defining what you value is one thing.

Building an organization capable of consistently practicing it is something entirely different.

That realization caused me to revisit our Three E’s.

I began evolving them beyond their original definitions and asking what each one actually requires of an individual. Then, what does it require of a team? And what should it look like across the organization?

Now, as I continue thinking about DCC's work around leadership infrastructure, I find myself asking an even bigger question:

What would we have to intentionally build into an organization for effectiveness, efficiency, and excellence to become organizational capacities and not simply individual expectations?

I don't have a finished answer yet. But I think the evolution of the question itself is worth sharing.

What This Work Is Teaching Me

When I first developed DCC’s Three E’s, I did what I think many leaders do.

I named the thing. We do this all the time in organizations. We define our values. We establish competencies. We create principles. We articulate expectations. We put language around the kind of organization we want to be and the kind of work we expect people to produce.

There is value in that. People need language. But language alone doesn't create practice.

This year, as I revisited our Three E’s, I realized that simply telling someone what it means to be effective, efficient, or excellent didn't answer an equally important question:

What does this actually look like here?

So I began examining each one across three contexts that are always operating simultaneously: The Individual. The Team. The Organization.

For the individual, what choices, behaviors, judgment, and ownership does this require?

For the team, what agreements, communication, accountability, and ways of working allow us to practice it together?

Across the organization, what systems, norms, structures, and conditions make it possible to sustain?

That changed how I saw the Three E’s.

Because an organization is never operating in only one of these contexts.

Organizations Are Operating in Three Contexts at Once

Every day, work is happening simultaneously at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

A highly capable individual can struggle inside a team with unclear expectations. A strong team can compensate for organizational systems that create unnecessary friction. And sophisticated systems mean little if people lack the judgment or ownership to use them well.

Sometimes, high-performing people compensate so effectively for weak infrastructure that leaders don't even realize there is a problem. Perhaps effectiveness, efficiency, and excellence aren't simply things we ask people to demonstrate.

Perhaps they are lenses for examining the relationship between people, performance, and the organizations we build around them.

DCC’s Three E’s, Reconsidered

Today, we define them this way:

Effective → Impact

Creating meaningful impact by aligning strategy, action, and outcomes.

Effectiveness asks: Are we actually accomplishing what matters?

Not simply: Did we complete the work?

It requires people who can think critically about purpose and outcomes. It requires teams that align on goals and ownership. And it requires an organization capable of learning from results and adjusting when effort isn't translating into impact.

Efficient → Flow & Systems

Moving with disciplined focus and peaceful urgency, supported by systems that reduce friction and maximize capacity.

Efficiency asks: How are we moving the work?

Not simply: Are we moving fast?

It requires individuals who manage time and energy intentionally. Teams that communicate, prepare, and coordinate well. And organizational systems that reduce unnecessary duplication, confusion, delay, and rework.

Efficiency, particularly in a humanity-centered organization, should not be about extracting more from people. It should be about reducing the organizational friction that wastes people’s time, energy, and talent.

Excellent → Quality & Integrity

Delivering high-quality work with rigor, integrity, and care.

Excellence asks: What standard are we committed to?

It requires individual mastery, intentionality, and ownership. Teams willing to give and receive feedback. And an organization that has made quality explicit enough that excellence doesn't depend on someone guessing what the leader has in their head.

These distinctions are becoming increasingly important to me. Because the more I examine them, the less I see three performance expectations. I see infrastructure.

The Leadership Truth

There is a tendency in leadership to locate performance primarily in the person.

Someone isn't moving quickly enough. Someone isn't producing at the expected level. Someone isn't getting results.

Sometimes, that assessment is exactly right. Individual accountability matters. Capability matters. Judgment matters. Follow-through matters.

But leadership requires us to interrogate another possibility too: What if the person is not the only unit of analysis?

What is happening on the team?
What is happening across the organization?
What expectations have actually been made explicit?
What decisions are taking too long?
Where is information getting lost?

Those are not excuses for poor performance. They are leadership questions.

And I think too many organizations jump from an undesirable outcome directly to an assessment of the individual without examining the infrastructure surrounding the work.

Accountability asks what the person is responsible for. Leadership infrastructure also asks what the organization is responsible for building. We need both.

What I Now Believe

I am still iterating on DCC’s Three E’s.

I actually think that matters. They started as three definitions. Then they became internal guideposts. Then I realized they needed to be translated across the individual, team, and organization.

And now I am wondering whether they offer a useful way to think about something much larger: How do we build organizations where the way people work supports the impact we are trying to create?

That is increasingly how I think about leadership infrastructure. It is not just organizational charts, policies, workflows, or technology.

And it is not simply leadership development.

It is the connective tissue between what an organization says it wants to accomplish and people's actual ability to accomplish it.

It lives in expectations and decision-making. Systems and relationships. Standards and feedback. Individual capability and collective practice. Accountability and support.

And when those things are aligned, effectiveness, efficiency, and excellence become less dependent on extraordinary individual effort and more embedded in how the organization works.

That is the part I had not fully considered when I first developed DCC’s Three E’s several years ago.

For Your Consideration

As you think about your own organization:

What have you defined that you may not yet have built for?
Which of the Three E’s—effectiveness, efficiency, or excellence—is strongest in your organization? Which is hardest to sustain?
Where might highly capable people be masking weak infrastructure?
And if you removed your strongest people from the equation, what would the systems themselves be capable of producing?

That last question has been sitting with me. Because our best people will often find a way.

They fill the gaps. They remember what the process forgot. They make the extra call. They fix the deliverable. They clarify the ambiguity. They carry knowledge the organization has never codified. And because the work gets done, we can mistake their extraordinary effort for organizational capacity.

It isn't the same thing.

Over my next three blogs, I am going to continue thinking publicly about each of DCC’s Three E’s—Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Excellence—and what each may teach us about building leadership infrastructure.

I don't yet know whether something we developed for ourselves will ultimately become something we use more intentionally with our partners.

But I do know the question has gotten much bigger than the three definitions I started with.

We should expect people to do good work.

We should also build organizations that make good work possible.

Because systems don't change themselves. People do.

But the systems we build profoundly shape what people are able to do within them.

What is leadership teaching you right now?

In Solidarity,

Dr. Annice E. Fisher

Originally published Aug 31, 2026 on LinkedIn