What Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?

It’s one of the first questions in the Baldrige Criteria. Few organizations have a good answer.

The Baldrige Criteria define core competencies as “your organization’s areas of greatest expertise…strategically important capabilities…central to your mission or provide an advantage,” that are frequently “challenging for competitors to imitate and provide a sustainable competitive advantage.”

What do you do better than your competitors that gives you an edge in your market?

Here’s an example from Richland College (RLC), the first and only community college to receive the Baldrige Award. Located in Dallas, Texas, RLC serves a multicultural student body of 14,500 students seeking college credits and another 6,000 continuing education students.

RLC has identified four core competencies:

• Seamless transitions for lifelong learning
• Leader-full, values-inspired agility and innovation
• Development and engagement of faculty and staff
• Sustainable community building – the triple bottom line

You will see evidence of processes RLC uses to take advantage of these core competencies in its award application summary and results that affirm that these are, indeed, RLC’s areas of expertise. Case in point: All employees have career-development plans that, for those employees encouraged to pursue senior leadership positions, include training, internships, and filling in for senior leaders when they are out. As a result, 22 former RLC employees have been named…

The Nonprescriptive Gift/Curse

The Criteria for Performance Excellence in all three forms (business/government/nonprofit, healthcare, and education) identify four characteristics of the Criteria, one of which is that the Criteria are nonprescriptive. This has been a key characteristic of the Criteria since they were developed in the late 1980s. Curt Reimann, the “father” of the Baldrige Criteria, described why this was done:

“We took a standards orientation and set out to develop a nonprescriptive framework that addressed the quality requirements. We took it in that direction because we [NIST] are a standards organization, because we feel that quality is not one thing you can write a prescription for and say that prescription fits your organization and mine and his and hers. It’s a set of requirements that gives you considerable latitude in fashioning your own quality system.”¹

The nonprescriptive nature of the Criteria makes them relevant to every organization of every stripe. That’s the gift.

It’s also a curse.

It’s very hard to market a nonprescriptive approach. Look at any quality movement of the past couple decades—ISO, Lean, Six Sigma, etc.—and you will find a very prescriptive approach. Materials can be written that define the approach. Consultants can become experts in implementing the approach. Most importantly, leaders can…

Moving Faster

As organizations grow, they lose their ability to move fast. Layers of management and pages of policies conspire against quick action. Hierarchical leadership structures delay decisions until word comes from the top. Functional silos put their priorities first and the organization’s needs second. Employees know what needs to be done but they lack the authority or, too often, the desire, to do it.

Agility is a core value of the Baldrige model and a distinguishing characteristic of recent Baldrige Award recipients. As the Criteria for Performance Excellence state, “Success in today’s ever-changing, globally competitive environment demands agility–a capacity for rapid change and flexibility.”

The Criteria ask how senior leaders create an environment for organizational agility. In an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, admits that “I’m a command-and-control guy. It clearly has worked well for me. I say, turn right, 66,000 people turn right. But that’s not the future. The future’s going to be all around collaboration and teamwork, with a structured process behind it. And that’s the key. You can’t move fast without a replicable process. So it’s about speed, combined with technology enablement, combined with a replicable process.”

Integrating the Baldrige model is a…