All Posts Tagged With: "assessment"
10 Critical Questions: Your Organization
In any field, being the best means knowing what is important and working to improve in those critical areas. Organizations are no different. Those that have received the Baldrige Award have used the Baldrige Criteria to help determine and address what was important to their success. The Criteria consist of powerful questions about how an organization functions: How do you do what you do? They are questions that have never been asked or that have been overlooked by people too busy to step back and consider how their organization operates. As a result, important decisions, processes, and information are missed. Continuous improvement is difficult to sustain and the mission and vision of the organization remain a distant dream. I encourage you to assess your organization using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment now, there are critical questions from the Criteria that, when answered, will illuminate key strengths and opportunities for improving your management system. Let’s start with 10 critical questions from the Organizational Profile:
- What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture?
- What are your organization’s core competencies?
- How do your core competencies relate to your mission?
- What are the key factors that motivate your employees?
- What are the key requirements and expectations for each customer group you serve?
- How do you communicate and manage relationships with suppliers, partners, and collaborators?
- What principal factors determine your success relative…
First Steps on the Baldrige Journey
There are no better advocates for the Baldrige journey than the leaders of organizations that have received the Baldrige Award. A video by the Alliance for Performance Excellence, a nonprofit network of international, national, state, and local Baldrige-based award programs, features several of these leaders explaining why they started that journey and what their organizations have gained from it.
I was particularly struck by a comment made by Rulon Stacey, president and CEO of Poudre Valley Health System, which won the Award in 2008. He said, “We’ve got lessons learned that are saving people’s lives because we participated in the Baldrige process.”
Terry Holliday, superintendent of Iredell-Statesville Schools, another 2008 Award recipient, talked about how, when his schools improve, more children are successful.
Michael Levinson, city manager of the City of Coral Springs, which received the Award in 2007, listed world-class results in response to people who ask, “Why Baldrige?”: AAA bond rating on Wall Street from all three rating agencies, bringing capital projects in on time and within budget, 96% business satisfaction rating, and a 94% resident satisfaction rating.
Our goal at Baldrige.com is to support the development of well-run, world-class organizations. That’s where the Baldrige journey takes you. Together, we can move toward our vision: Every Organization a Baldrige Organization.
To watch the 11-minute video, click here.
Help grow our community 
25 “Moonshots for Management”
Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.
Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:
- “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
- The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
- We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.
The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:
- Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
- Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
- Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The…
Interpreting Criteria Questions
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 10 Tips to make a difficult but rewarding journey a little easier.
- 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.
- 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 have to do it fast, read a Category. You’ll get a sense of how to craft responses that answer the questions accurately, completely, and concisely.
- 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.
- 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…
Introducing Leaders to Baldrige
For whatever reason (it usually has something to do with a competitor or customer), a senior leader or leadership team suddenly wants to know more about Baldrige. What do you do?
A good place to start is by pointing them to Baldrige.com. We’ve got a number of articles and other resources that explain the basics of Baldrige.
You should also direct them to the Baldrige program’s Web site and encourage them to read the relevant Criteria booklet and look at the profiles and application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients that interest them. A Baldrige booklet, Your Guide to Performance Excellence, also has suggestions on how to get started with Baldrige.
If your organization resides in a state with a quality award program (you can find out if your state has such a program here), find the Web site address for that program and pass that along, too. Your leaders may find executives they know who can share their Baldrige experiences.
If your leaders have no time or desire to read any of this stuff (a pretty typical reaction), you can go to these sites and summarize key points to present to the leadership team or you can have them do a half-hour exercise. I know a half-hour is a big chunk of a leadership team’s meeting time but you can sell it as a way to understand what Baldrige is about while also learning a little about the strengths and…
31Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Is the Enemy of Good
“Good is the enemy of great.”
I’ve used that line more than once when talking to senior leaders. It’s the first sentence of Jim Collins’ groundbreaking book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap (HarperCollins, 2001).
I then add, “Baldrige is the enemy of good.”
An organization that considers itself good at what it does is unlikely to score more than 300 points of a possible 1,000 on its first Baldrige assessment. Most organizations respond to this performance in one of three ways:
- They discount the validity of the score and walk away from the Baldrige process.
- They make the comfortable improvements and leave the basic systems untouched.
- They pursue performance excellence by transforming their management systems.
Those who choose “a” or “b” may continue to be good but they are unlikely to become great unless they are compelled to change. But then, not every organization has greatness in its future.
Jim Collins has recognized the impact Baldrige can have: “I see the Baldrige process as a powerful set of mechanisms for disciplined people engaged in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action to create great organizations that produce exceptional results.”
Baldrige is the enemy of good.
Help grow our community:
