A letter to the editor in the October 2009 issue of Quality Progress asked if the quality profession has become marginalized because the American Society for Quality is spending so much time telling people how to sell quality to upper management. On the very next page of the magazine, a reader asks “Expert Answers” how to create quality awareness in his/her organization.

Last month, I took a question posed at Rehaul.com—Is Human Resources fatally flawed?—and posted it for discussion on a LinkedIn HR group. The responses suggested that a lot of HR people are feeling at least as marginalized as quality professionals.

Why is that? No organization questions the need to improve quality. Every organization claims its people are its most valuable resource. So why do so many quality and HR professionals feel marginalized?

I think the answer has to do with value: The organizations they work for place a low value on these professionals’ contributions and the professionals don’t add enough value to the organization to change that.

The Baldrige model provides a way back from the margin. First, it broadens the scope—and, therefore, the value—of quality and human resources.

For the quality folks, the Baldrige model is a process model. It asks “how” you do what you do more than 130 times. It seeks effective, systematic, well-deployed approaches that are evaluated and improved in a learning organization. Quality professionals who are experts at process management and improvement can add significant value to their organizations by helping to institutionalize process thinking.

For the HR folks, one of the Baldrige core values is “valuing workplace members.” As the Criteria booklet notes, HR professionals can add significant value by helping their organizations develop “an engaged workforce that benefits from meaningful work, clear organizational direction, and performance accountability and that has a safe, trusting, and cooperative environment. Additionally, the successful organization capitalizes on the diverse backgrounds, knowledge, skills, creativity, and motivation of its workforce.”

Second, the Baldrige model gives quality and HR professionals the bigger picture view they must have to escape the margins. If you define your role by the tasks you perform—auditing, testing, certifying, training, managing benefits, hiring, etc.—you are a cog in the machine. You are a commodity and you are easily replaced. If, however, your role is integral to achieving your organization’s goals and objectives in support of its vision and mission, in both strategic and tactical ways, with performance measures that quantify the value you (or your department) add, then you have become essential to your organization’s success.

So you need to acquire that big picture perspective. Here’s what I would do:

• Read the Baldrige Criteria booklet. It’s the best way to identify and understand all of the factors that comprise your management system and to see how you can add value.
• Read one or more application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients. The summaries provide descriptions of how real-life, world-class management systems work. You will learn how you can add value to your own organization.
• Become a Baldrige or state award examiner. You will receive extensive training in understanding the Baldrige model and evaluating award applications. As you go through the training and work with applications, you will internalize the Baldrige model. You will begin to see how your organization works, or doesn’t work, from a systems perspective, and that will allow you to add more value to meetings, discussions, and plans.
• Integrate Baldrige thinking into your work. Ask the questions that the Baldrige Criteria ask. Focus on the processes. Clarify what your customers—internal and external—really require. Identify what “world-class” for your organization, in your areas of expertise, would look like. Help those around you see how their work can support the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the organization.

In my experience, the quality and HR professionals who work for Baldrige Award recipients rarely feel marginalized. In fact, they are often the leaders of the efforts to integrate the Baldrige model. We can’t all work for these organizations, but we can learn from them, and what we can learn is that a systems perspective—and the ability to add value to the system—makes you an invaluable part of the organization.

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