1 | Leadership
Shrink the Change
I’m guilty of being negative. When I evaluate a company’s Baldrige assessment, I dutifully note its strengths but I really zero in on its opportunities for improvement. And that’s a mistake.
In their thought-provoking book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway Business, 2010), brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain why you need to learn how to recognize and understand your strengths, the best practices, the small victories—the bright spots:
“To pursue bright spots is to ask the question ‘What’s working, and how can we do more of it?’ Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused, ‘What’s broken, and how do we fix it?’”
I highly recommend Switch for its eclectic mix of research from a wide variety of fields that challenges the accepted wisdom about change. Change is hard? It doesn’t have to be that hard. We need a burning platform? Not really. Use SMART goals to change? Won’t work.
Instead, how about: Shrink the change. “Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory,” write the Heaths. Arrange for early successes and you build momentum for the bigger changes ahead.
Or: Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving. As they note, “the middle is going to look different once you get there.” Know where you…
2Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.
- Mobility of management. It takes a long time…
How to Build a Culture of Social Responsibility
Social responsibility is a Baldrige core value because it is a characteristic of high-performing organizations. According to a study by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, more organizations are establishing corporate citizenship management policies and practices to ensure citizenship is integrated into their core business. The study concludes: “Increasingly, customers, employees, business partners, and government demand that corporations take an active role in social, environmental, and community concerns. That’s why strategic corporate citizenship is more than good business—it’s a business essential.”
If business ethics and corporate social responsibility have not been priorities at your organization and you want to change that, where do you start? The Hill Center for Ethical Business Leadership can show you the way.
The Hill Center is part of the James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul, Minnesota. It works with leaders who want to take their organizations beyond ethical compliance to align ethics with business performance. To that end, it created the eInsight Ethics Quiz.
The quiz takes about 20 minutes to complete. There are no right or wrong answers. Final scores are compared against industry peers and action steps are provided to improve performance.
Leaders looking for ideas on how to build a culture of business ethics and corporate social responsibility will find guidance in the feedback to their survey. And it’s free! Click here to take the quiz. Click here to learn more about how the resources the…
16Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBackdoor Access to World-Class Performance
A CEO recently enlightened me about the transformative power of a robust safety, diversity, or ethics program: It can institutionalize a culture of employee engagement, process management, open communication, and continuous improvement.
Safety, diversity, and ethics have value in and of themselves. Where they have value beyond themselves is in their ability to align people with a shared vision. Everybody shares the vision of a safe workplace. Everyone shares the vision of a diverse workforce (well, maybe not everyone, but nobody’s going to argue against it). Everyone shares the vision of working for an ethical organization.
Leaders can use safety, diversity, and ethics to rally people around ambitious goals and get them nodding in agreement, establish the habit of adhering to policies and procedures, focus people on measurable results, communicate a consistent message, pursue process improvements, and celebrate success. In other words, safety, diversity, and ethics are levers that leaders can use to transform their organizations. They are large-scale pilot projects for how to make your organization more systematic, holistic, and aligned.
For example, if you are an executive for a bank with dissatisfied customers and employees, declining revenue, and escalating costs, and you want to do something about it, you may want to change your bank’s culture. Rather than give in to the quick-but-fatal temptation to invest in dubious risky ventures, you can buck the trend by becoming a role model for…
9Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMaking Change Happen
This is a guest article by Arnie Weimerksirch. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.
Change is difficult. In our personal lives we struggle to break bad habits, eat a healthier diet, or get more exercise. In spite of our good intentions, we often fail.
Organizations also find it difficult to change: Studies show that almost 85% of change initiatives fail. Even when faced with a crisis, many organizations are not able to make the changes necessary to survive. As W. Edwards Deming said, “Survival is not mandatory; it is purely optional.”
In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Fortune 500 list, only 71 of the original 500 remained on the list. Not all of them failed, of course, but the majority did. And they failed because they were not able to change with the times.
Why is change so difficult and what is the answer? One of the main reasons transformation initiatives fail is our love of management fads. In her book, Fad Surfing in the Boardroom, Eileen Shapiro defines fad surfing as “the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations.”
New management theories are constantly developed by “gurus” and published in prestigious journals. Recent examples include the boundaryless…
8Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige for the 20-Teens
Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London. She recently wrote an article about Baldrige for the Harvard Business Review entitled “A Better Decade for Business is Coming” (December 31, 2009). And she wrote it without using the word “Baldrige” once!
Corkindale lists four things business leaders can do to correct the negative perception of business built during the past decade (Enron’s collapse, dotcom bust, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, irresponsibility of the banking sector, global recession, declining wages—unless you’re an executive, etc.). Her four recommendations are:
- Examine your organization systematically. “What is really going on?” she writes. “What needs to be improved?” In other words, conduct a Baldrige assessment to answer these questions and systematically improve your organization.
- Build a new dialogue for business. Leaders must make ethical behavior, accountability, sustainability, longer-term focus, and community awareness part of the business agenda. Once again, a Baldrige assessment will help you understand how to make these issues part of your agenda and how well you do it.
- Engage people to make the best possible contribution to the business and wider society. “This means sharing power, information, responsibility, and, of course, rewards,” writes Corkindale. Workforce engagement, a key element of the Baldrige model, considers how you share power, information, responsibility, and rewards.
- Understand what it really takes to be a leader. “Simplicity is the key.” A Baldrige assessment helps leaders lead by presenting a clear picture of where their…
New Guidelines for Social Responsibility
“Organizations around the world, and their stakeholders, are becoming increasingly aware of the need for and benefits of socially responsible behavior. The aim of social responsibility is to contribute to sustainable development.”
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been working on ISO 26000: Guidance on Social Responsibility since 2005. The quote above is part of the introduction in a draft of ISO 26000 available online here.
The guidelines address trends, characteristics, and principles of social responsibility, guidance on core subjects (organizational governance, human rights, labor practices, the environment, fair operating practices, consumer issues, and community involvement and development), and how to integrate social responsibility in an organization.
ISO emphasizes that the guidelines are not meant as a management system standard or intended for certification purposes or regulatory or contractual use. Instead, ISO 26000:
- Provides guidance on the underlying principles of social responsibility
- Is intended to be useful to all types of organizations
- Is intended for use by those beginning to address social responsibility as well as those more experienced with its implementation
Ninety-one countries and 42 organizations are participating in the development of ISO 26000. The goal is to finalize and publish it as an International Standard in late 2010. As the organization notes in a brochure about the guidelines (available here -pdf), “The future ISO 26000 will distill a globally relevant understanding of what social responsibility is and what organizations need to do to operate in a…
27Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
