Bill George (no relation), former CEO of Medtronic, likes to talk about “authentic leaders” who focus on customers rather than hierarchical leaders who serve short-term shareholders. In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, “The New 21^st Century Leaders” (April 30, 2010), George writes about four critical tasks today’s leaders must perform, all of which are addressed and supported by the Baldrige model:

Aligning. The highest-performing Baldrige organizations excel and alignment and integration. They have found that their missions and visions can only be achieved if everyone is moving toward them. Baldrige Award winners typically use their strategic plans to define this direction and the deployment of those plans and of balanced scorecards to make sure everyone is working on what is most important to the organization.

Empowering. Things are moving too fast to wait for marching orders from your supervisor, who must wait for her manager, who must wait for his director, who must wait for her vice president, who must wait for the president. Baldrige Award winners empower their people to make decisions by training, directing, and recognizing them and by holding them accountable.

Collaborating. We can’t do it alone, and that’s true of individuals or departments or business units or entire organizations. Baldrige Award winners blur the lines between themselves and their customers, suppliers, competitors, and communities, focusing on cooperation and the common good.

As Bill George concludes, “Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders can galvanize the entire organization to sustain long-term performance. We need them to rebuild the trust that has been lost in capitalism.”

To read more about authentic leadership, click on these articles:

• Shrink the Change
• Management’s Five Deadly Diseases
• Making Change Happen
• Co-Creating a Shared Vision
• Why Organizations Fail
• The Best-Performing CEOs in the World

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