The Baldrige Criteria pose questions that, when answered, can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your management system.

P.1a in the Organizational Profile asks fundamental questions about your operating environment. A few are easy to answer, such as what products and/or services you offer and how you deliver them. Others require more thought:

• What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture? You may not have thought much about this. For most organizations, culture is what happens when you’ve been around for awhile. Key characteristics others frequently mention include a focus on customers/patients/students, empowered employees with few levels of management, extensive use of teams, promoting innovation throughout the organization, valuing employee safety, and pursuing world-class quality and cycle time.

• What are your core competencies? How do they relate to your mission? Core competencies are your organization’s areas of greatest expertise that help you fulfill your mission and differentiate you from your competitors. If your core competencies don’t align with your mission, you’ve got a problem.

• What are the key factors that motivate your employees to engage in accomplishing your mission? Later, the Criteria ask how you determine these factors, so don’t just pull them out of a hat. High-performing organizations often pull their lists of key factors off employee surveys after systematically verifying that the factors addressed by the survey do, indeed, affect workforce engagement.

The Organizational Profile is the foundation upon which a Baldrige assessment is built. Everything that follows is supported by and linked to the information the Profile seeks.

You can read all of the questions in the Profile in the Criteria booklets, which are available online here.

To learn more about these questions, read:

• What Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?
• The Baldrige Criteria
• Criteria Structure
• 10 Tips for Answering Criteria Questions

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