Hands-On Leadership
“Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry.”
The quote from Stanford University emeritus professor James G. March appeared in a BusinessWeek article, “The Best Leadership Is Good Management,” by Henry Mintzberg (August 9, 2009; h/t Richard Mallory on the LinkedIn MBNQA Examiners Group). The point of the article, Mintzberg writes, is that “U.S. businesses now have too many leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing. So they don’t know what’s going on.”
The Baldrige model addresses this issue head on. In the first Item of the first Category, the Criteria ask how senior leaders are personally involved in setting, sharing, and living their organizations’ vision and values, promoting legal and ethical behavior, creating a learning environment committed to performance excellence, and engaging in two-way communication with employees.
By embedding core values such as a focus on the future, Baldrige organizations value long-term thinking and ensure that leaders are involved in the actions, as well as the ideas, that will achieve their goals.
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