1 | Leadership
Building a Community of Excellence
Saint Joseph, Missouri, plans to become a Community of Excellence. St. Joseph is the home of 2009 Baldrige Award winner Heartland Health, which I’ve written about here and here. Its CEO, Dr. Mark Laney, recently spoke at an annual event for area business leaders about what they could do to achieve the quality standards and performance of Heartland, which was described in the St. Joseph News-Press here.
The announcement of St. Joseph’s intent to become a Community of Excellence followed Dr. Laney’s speech. The concept has gained traction about three hours away in Columbia, Missouri, which is the home of another Baldrige Award winner, MidwayUSA. Its CEO, Larry Potterfield, has helped organize a community excellence initiative it calls a Baldrige Performance Excellence Group. I wrote about Columbia’s effort here. The group has produced a BPEG booklet that provides a blueprint for creating your own Community of Excellence including how to start your own BPEG, how to structure it, who to involve, events, bylaws, dues, and key processes. You can read the booklet here (pdf). In the preface to the booklet, Harry Hertz, director of the Baldrige National Quality Program, wrote, “Monthly meetings, and the local networks and contacts that are developed, are a key to helping organizations get on track, stay on track, and accelerate their journey to performance excellence. The support provided by these community groups should lead to mutual learning and breakthrough improvements for their members.”
One of the greatest attributes of the Baldrige model is its universality: The same model is relevant…
13Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhere Are the Disconnects in Your Organization?
This year, Baldrige examiners were asked to assess their organizations using the Baldrige program’s questionnaires: “Are We Making Progress as Leaders?” for examiners who work in management or “Are We Making Progress?” for examiners who do not. The questionnaires ask for level of agreement with statements related to the Baldrige Criteria, in the case of employees, or their perceptions of their organizations, in the case of leaders.
In a few areas, the 173 employees and 294 leaders who took the test differed significantly. These disconnects suggest problems with processes, communication, or both:
- Know how to measure work quality: 78% of employees said they know how while 51% of leaders agreed that they do
- Use work quality measures to make improvements: 74% of employees said they did while 43% of leaders agreed
- Customers are satisfied with work performed: 85% of employees agreed compared to 69% of employees
- My boss and organization care about me: 69% of employees agreed compared to 84% of leaders
It’s important to note that the employees and leaders who answered the questionnaire do not, for the most part, work at the same organizations. And the employees in the group are Baldrige examiners: One would expect them to know how to measure work quality and use those measure to make improvements. If the questionnaires were administered to leaders and employees in one organization, the results might be different.
You can test that theory by rolling out the questionnaire in your organization. If you do, you will still find disconnects between what employees believe and what…
9Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and Superior Execution
The answer: The Baldrige model.
The question: How do you solve the top CEO challenge identified by The Conference Board for the last five years?
That challenge is superior execution. According to an article by Accenture in June 2011, available here: “As companies resume the quest for profitable growth and high performance in the upturn, they can no longer afford to ignore the role of process in delivering value to their customers.”
The Baldrige model is a process model. Six of the seven categories in the model ask how you do what you do and what you do to manage and improve those processes, and the seventh category asks for the results of your processes. Companies that integrate the Baldrige model have identified their key processes, understand their value streams, align work with strategy, focus on what is truly important for success, and continually improve their processes. They use Baldrige to achieve what Accenture believes is a four-step journey to process management:
- Link strategy with execution. The Baldrige model demands alignment of processes with stakeholder requirements, action plans with strategies and objectives, and strategies with the company’s mission and vision. If you want first-hand experience with the power of alignment, read the application summary of a Baldrige Award winner.
- Eliminate unnecessary complexity. One of the benefits of evaluating your management system using the Baldrige model is that it reveals unnecessary complexity, exposing issues for senior leaders to prioritize and address.
- Transform in the right way. Senior leaders often face too many problems and too many options to feel confident about…
Baldrige Model: What are your financial and marketplace performance results?
Item 7.5 in the Baldrige Criteria asks for your key financial and marketplace performance results. The following examples from Baldrige Award-winning applications show strong current levels, positive trends, and positive comparisons to key benchmarks. To read the descriptions of these measures and to see a broader range of Item 7.5 measures, go to the Results category responses of Baldrige Award-winner applications here. Chart numbers may not correspond to the Item number because of changes to the Criteria.
Baldrige Model: What are your senior leadership and governance results?
Item 7.4 in the Baldrige Criteria asks for your senior leadership and governance results. The following examples from Baldrige Award-winning applications show strong current levels, positive trends, and positive comparisons to key benchmarks. To read the descriptions of these measures and to see a broader range of Item 7.4 measures, go to the Results category responses of Baldrige Award-winner applications here. Chart numbers may not correspond to the Item number because of changes to the Criteria.
Baldrige Promotes Resilience
No matter what your organization does, it must be resilient to overcome adversity, whether that adversity comes from a recessionary economy, global competition, runaway healthcare costs, or shrinking budgets in education and government. Baldrige Award winners exemplify resiliency through visionary leadership, employee engagement, open communication, and a focus on the future.
George S. Everly, Jr., PhD is associate professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, executive director of Resiliency Science Institutes, and author of Resilient Leadership: When Failure Is Not an Option. In “Building a Resilient Organizational Culture,” he writes that “just as individuals can learn to develop personal traits of resilience, so too can organizations develop a culture of resilience.” This occurs when key leaders demonstrate four core attributes of optimism, decisiveness, integrity, and open communication. When a few leaders model these behaviors, Everly notes, “we believe they have the ability to change an entire culture of an organization as others replicate the resilient characteristics they have observed.”
The framework for changing the culture addresses four areas:
- People prosper from success. Create an environment that makes it possible for people to succeed, especially early in their careers, and then increase the difficulty and complexity of tasks.
- People learn while observing others. Assign new employees to successful work groups so they can experience “vicarious success.”
- People need encouragement, support, and mentoring. “Research suggests that the single most powerful predictor of human resilience is interpersonal support.”
- People need basic training in how to manage personal stress. Everly calls this “developing psychological body armor.”
He concludes with examples of resilient organizations…
27Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCorporate Social Responsibility Is Unstoppable
“While consumer power for a better world is still nascent, it’s poised to skyrocket. Consumer pressure will greatly expand the breadth and depth of CSR, forcing companies to willfully change their practices,” writes Simon Mainwaring in his new book, We First, excerpted here in Fast Company. (Note: If you want proof that the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement Mainwaring describes has gone mainstream, consider that his book is ranked #19 for all books on Amazon.)
According to Mainwaring:
- 83% of consumers are willing to change their consumption habits if it can help make tomorrow’s world a better place to live.
- 61% have sought a brand that supports a good cause even if it was not the cheapest brand.
- 64% would recommend a brand that supports a good cause, up from 52% last year.
- 56% believe the interests of society and the interests of businesses should have equal weight in business decisions.
- 67% would switch brands if a different brand of similar quality supported a good cause.
The data point to a warning for companies that choose to ignore CSR and to an opportunity for those that embrace it. More and more consumers are factoring corporate social responsibility into their buying decisions.
Mainwaring believes the consumer drive for CSR will become unstoppable for three reasons:
- Many consumers are frustrated and angry at corporations. “Millions of them have been personally affected by the relentless corporate drive for profit above all else, having lost their jobs. These are people who are now distrustful of corporations and intolerant of selfish behaviors that negatively affect their…
