10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership
In a previous post, we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization that will illuminate key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment now, here are 10 more critical questions, this time about senior leadership, which can help you uncover opportunities for improving your leadership system.
- How do senior leaders set and deploy your organization’s vision and values?
- How do their personal actions reflect their commitment to these values?
- How do senior leaders personally promote legal and ethical behavior?
- How do they create a sustainable organization?
- How do they create an environment for performance improvement and leadership, accomplishing your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, organizational agility, and organizational and workforce learning?
- How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce, including two-way communication and communicating key decisions?
- How do senior leaders create a focus on action to accomplish your organization’s objectives, improve performance, and attain your vision?
- What performance measures do they regularly review to identify needed actions?
- How do you evaluate the performance of senior leaders?
- How do they use their performance reviews to further their development, improve their personal leadership effectiveness, and improve the performance of the leadership system?
If you want to know how world-class organizations answer these questions, read Category 1, Leadership, in their online award application summaries.
If you want to see all of the questions asked about Leadership, turn to the first Category in the Baldrige Criteria booklets.
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Yes, without top management’s full support, quality efforts would either be slowed down or not progress at all. The problem is that some leaders only “mouth” their support but do not provide a sustainable process and structure (through workplace cooperation) for quality efforts to be carried-on, company-wide. The leader’s Vision must first be shared and fully understood by everyone in the organization so that most employees can also participate in the development of their shared Mission. The leader’s values guide his Policy statement that leads to proper development of the organizations’ Goals which when broken into specific Objectives can be translated to Activities that can then be properly recorded and Monitored. Our company’s (Quality Partners Company, Ltd) acronym for this quality development program is VMP-GOAM.
The first right thing to do for any quality improvement initiative is to seek “top management” support. Start with the Chairman, Board Members, President/CEO and other senior leaders in the organization. But these senior leaders should also answer these 10 critical questions to give them and others a proper perspective to illuminate key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As the saying goes: “Quality is everyone’s responsibility. We are all in this together.”