Baldrige Is a Continuous Improvement Program

Those leaders who decide to give Baldrige a spin often focus on the obvious step: conducting a Baldrige assessment. Some may apply for a state award or the Baldrige Award, but most do an internal assessment, which identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement. If the assessment is done right and professionally evaluated, the list of opportunities is long—much longer than any organization can address is one year. As a result, too many organizations only conduct that one assessment, thus missing their opportunity to build a world-class management system.

Baldrige Award winners integrate Baldrige by performing regular—usually annual—Baldrige assessments. The process of producing assessments and prioritizing and acting on the opportunities they reveal institutionalizes a culture of continuous improvement. It keeps everyone focused on what is most important for the organization to grow and excel. It improves the alignment of people and processes with the organization’s goals, objectives, and strategies. Best of all, it delivers results, as the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners show.

IndustryWeek recently reported on a survey it conducted with TBM Consulting about the impact of continuous-improvement programs on three financial metrics: anticipated revenue growth, operating income growth, and cash flow over the past year. “Across the board, companies…

Tata: World-Class Baldrige Role Model

If your organization wants to achieve and sustain excellent performance, you need a proven, systematic approach. For the Tata companies, India’s largest business conglomerate, that approach is the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM), which is adapted from the Baldrige model.

It’s an approach Honeywell took in the mid-1990s with measurable results. As the average scores of its internal Baldrige assessments improved, so did its operating profit.

Tata companies has also internalized the Baldrige process, which is managed by Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS). The description of the Tata process from its Web site sounds exactly like the Baldrige application process:

Through TBEM, TQMS helps Tata companies gain insights on their strengths and their opportunities for improvement. This is managed through an annual process of applications and assessments. Each company writes an application wherein it describes, in the context of the TBEM matrix, what it does and how it does it. This submission is then gauged by trained assessors who study the application, visit the company and interact with its people. The assessors map out the strengths and improvement opportunities existing in the company before providing their feedback to its leadership team.

TQMS trains and certifies assessors, who are selected from across the group, and…

Barriers to Success

“Barriers to an organization’s effectiveness are internally built and locally maintained.”

And profoundly harmful, according to Gallup. “Tearing Down the Barriers to Success” in the Gallup Management Journal (February 16, 2011) lists fives causes of barriers identified by studying the phenomenon across industries, job types, countries, and organizational levels: fear, information flow, short-term thinking, misalignment, and money.

I wrote about the corrosive effect of fear here. Gallup identifies two types of information flow barriers: transmission (information does not get into the hands of those who need it) and assimilation (too much information and not enough time or resources to interpret it). Short-term thinking barriers occur when decisions are made too quickly, without consulting those who must live with it, or when long-term issues are known but ignored or rationalized away.

Misalignment barriers come in three types, according to Gallup:

• No clear link between personal and organizational missions or a general lack of mission, vision, and/or strategy.
• Misalignment of different departments’ goals that often put them in direct opposition. For example, the sales department demands more inventory to better serve the immediate needs of customers while the procurement department has goals for minimizing inventory.
• Money barriers range from departments protecting their budgets and headcount to individuals manipulating…

Baldrige FAQs: The Baldrige Assessment

Organizations integrate the Baldrige model by performing assessments using the Baldrige Criteria. The serious ones typically do it annually, although some wait two or even three years before repeating it because they want to work on the opportunities for improvement identified by their previous assessment. A Baldrige assessment may be done internally or submitted as an application for local or state awards or the Baldrige Award.

What is a Baldrige assessment?

Organizations conduct a Baldrige assessment by responding to the questions in the Baldrige Criteria. The simplest assessments respond to the questions in the Organizational Profile, which is the first part of the Criteria and addresses your organizational environment and relationships and your competitive environment. The most common—and most valuable—assessment responds to all of the questions posed by the Baldrige Criteria. To see what the best Baldrige assessments look like, read one or more of the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners, available here.

How does this work?

Each question in the Criteria asks about a specific element of your management system, organized by seven major categories. A Baldrige assessment responds to all of the questions with accurate and concise answers, which may be narrative or graphic or a combination of the two.…