The questions in the Baldrige Criteria can be overwhelming for first-time responders. They are often complex. The language they use may be different than the language your organization uses. Questions may sound alike. The learning curve is steep and frustrating to climb.

Here are ten tips to make a difficult journey a little easier.

1. Become familiar with all of the Criteria. Each question is one part of a holistic management system. You need a general understanding of everything in that system to see where your Category, Item, Area to Address, and/or questions fit. Read the relevant Criteria booklet cover to cover before tackling your section. Your eyes will glaze over and your hand will fall asleep and your head will nod, but there is no easy way to learn Baldrige. You need to know what it covers and you get a glimpse of that by reading the Criteria booklet.
2. Read at least one Baldrige Award recipient’s responses. The application summaries of 44 recipients are available online through the Baldrige program. Pick one. If you want to do it right, get your hands on the relevant Criteria booklet for that year and read the questions before reading the responses. You’ll be amazed at what you learn. If you want to do it fast, read a Category. You’ll get a sense for how to craft responses that answer the questions accurately, completely, and concisely.
3. Start with the Organizational Profile. The Profile presents basic information about your organization upon which the Category responses are built. You’re flying blind if you start answering questions without the Profile to guide you and you’ll end up either revising your responses to align with the Profile or producing a section that sounds like a totally different organization.
4. Break each question into pieces. How many questions are in this Criteria question from the Customer Focus Category: How do you listen to customers to obtain actionable information and to obtain feedback on your products and your customer support? The answer is four. And you’d better answer each one of them. And no excuses about two questions asking the same thing: They don’t. Study them until you find the difference and then answer each question.
5. Study the Notes and Category/Item Descriptions. And you thought your reading was done. The Notes and Descriptions in the Criteria booklet help clarify the questions-not all of them, because some questions don’t need clarifying and this is a booklet after all, not a book-but just enough to give you hope.
6. Consider the Scoring Guidelines. The Scoring Guidelines are also in the Criteria booklet. They explain how an application is evaluated. Examiners consider two dimensions: process, or how you do what you do, which relates to Categories 1 to 6, and results, or how you’re doing on your processes, which relates to Category 7. The Scoring Guidelines act as a filter by separating the trivial verbosity from the vital essence of the response. If you want to know what vital essence looks like, repeat Tip #2.
7. Understand “how” and “what.” “How” means: What’s your process? It appears more than 130 times in the Criteria. The Scoring Guidelines describe how to respond to “how” questions: What’s your approach, how and how widely is it deployed, how do you refine the process, and how is it aligned with what your organization is trying to accomplish. “What” is easier: Provide the information being requested.
8. Show trends and benchmarks and explain each graph. Again, look at how Baldrige Award recipients have responded to Category 7. Benchmarks are always hard to find so start looking for them right away. Each graph’s explanation has to be just long enough to help someone who knows nothing about your organization or industry understand what the graph shows and why it’s important. If the graph shows an adverse trend, explain what happened and what you did about it to get it back on track and prevent the problem from recurring.
9. Don’t worry about length. The best responses are complete and concise-but that’s not likely to happen with the first draft. Focus first on writing a complete response with the understanding that you can whittle it down later. If you’re lucky, that will be someone else’s job, but as someone who has done that job more than once, I always welcomed long responses and supporting documentation and anything else the writers wanted to throw at me. Sometimes the real stars of a response are hiding in a corner and if you don’t show me the corner, they never make it onto the stage.
10. Refer to other parts of the assessment. You’ll see a lot of this in an Award recipient’s application summary. Each question, Area, Item, and Category is part of a single management system, intertwined and dependent. If you’ve read the Criteria booklet (see Tip #1), you’ve probably noticed some of these connections. In the best applications, a few unifying processes appear throughout the document, such as strategic planning or a balanced scorecard or process management. The unifying process is thoroughly described in the section where it makes the most sense and then referenced throughout the rest of the application. Some people refer to these as “golden threads” because they demonstrate alignment and integration, which are distinguishing characteristics of high-performing organizations.

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