All Posts Tagged With: "Baldrige Criteria"
“Brown-ing” Baldrige
I’m a big fan of author and Baldrige expert Mark Brown. The LinkedIn Baldrige Improvement Discussion Group recently launched a discussion about how to improve the Baldrige Criteria and, while many contributed, I was struck by Brown’s insights and ideas. Here are a few—and make sure you read all the way to the end:
- Eliminate 75% of the words. “Review the Criteria from the 1990s and the current Singapore criteria or the abbreviated criteria used by New Zealand or California to see a closer approximation of what the Criteria need to become.”
- Lose Results Item 7.4. “No one understands this, most don’t have any data to include, and, when combined with 1.2, leadership and governance are worth 50 points more than financial and market results, which is completely ridiculous,” Brown wrote.
- Overhaul Category 2. Change the terminology (i.e., goals instead of objectives), make Item 2.1 about your planning process and Item 2.2 about what your plans are. “Regarding points, the process for doing planning is far less important than the plan itself.”
- Lose the questions that ask how you design work processes and systems. Having tried to respond to these questions dozens of times, I completely agree. “No one sat down with a blank sheet of paper when creating a hospital, restaurant, or airline.” Answering questions about how you design a work system or process is one of the biggest challenges in a Baldrige application.
- Remove questions about emergency preparedness, which “is another…
Baldrige Criteria: The Organizational Profile
Describe your organization in five pages. That’s the challenge when answering the 33 questions posed by the Organizational Profile in the Baldrige Criteria.
As the first part of the Criteria, the Profile provides a snapshot of your organization. It is divided into two items: the first asks about your organization’s key characteristics and the second addresses your strategic situation. Examiners do not score the Profile—your score is based on the seven Categories that follow—but that does not mean the Profile is less important. Examiners use it to figure out what your organization does, understand the nature of your competition and your strategic situation, and learn about your customers, employees, and suppliers. A strong Profile establishes the expectation that what follows will describe a well-run organization. A poor Profile predisposes the reader to expect average or worse processes and performance.
In a Pal’s Business Excellence Institute webinar this week (click here to view), Baldrige expert David McClaskey identified five keys to writing an effective Profile:
- Focus on the vital few most important parts of the Profile, which are the questions on your product and service offerings (P.1a1 in the Criteria), vision and mission (P.1a2), workforce profile (P.1a3), customers and stakeholders (P.1b2), competitive position (P.2a1), and strategic challenges and advantages (P.2b).
- Clarify what is important to your organization and what is not important by the order in which you address things, the relative weight given to similar items, and what you choose…
30 Principles of Effective Leadership
I’m always looking for ways to spread the Baldrige gospel, which usually involves summarizing or condensing the 230+ questions in the Baldrige Criteria. My latest discovery comes courtesy of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Group and its sponsor, 2009 Baldrige Award winner Midway USA.
I’ll write more about the BPEG in my next post, but I wanted to focus on one of the resources the site provides, which is a list of 30 principles of effective leadership and management. You can find the list here (pdf). Midway USA created the document to: (1) help those not familiar with the Baldrige Criteria to understand that Baldrige isn’t something new or different but rather a collection of tried-and-true principles; (2) provide a quick self-assessment tool for leaders to determine how well their organizations are applying these principles; and (3) encourage other organizations to adopt Baldrige as a framework to improve performance.
The list of principles includes an explanation of why each is a principle and a means for leaders to assess their organization’s current performance on each principle. The self-assessment uses the Baldrige method of ADLI:
- Approach: Your methods are appropriate and effective.
- Deployment: Your approach is understood and utilized wherever appropriate.
- Learning: Your approach has gone through multiple cycles of learning and refinement.
- Integration: Your approach is aligned with the plans and processes in place to achieve your organization’s goals.
For example, one of the leadership principles is: “Identify the key processes within your organization…
8Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBarriers 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 the bonus system at the expense of others.
According to Gallup, the best way to attack these barriers is to conduct “an objective analysis of the root causes, manifestation, and impact of barriers.” I disagree. I…
28Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedGearing Up for Baldrige Season
If you want to identify the flaws in your management system—flaws that directly affect performance by increasing costs, decreasing revenues, and inhibiting sustainable growth—and you want to know how to prioritize those opportunities, you need to assess your management system using the Baldrige Criteria.
You can do an assessment internally or you can submit that assessment as an application for a state award or the Baldrige Award. Much like tax season in the U.S., this is Baldrige season, with applications due on or before May 17. If you plan on applying for the Award, you must first submit your intent to register, which is due by March 1 if you want someone in your organization to be trained as a Baldrige examiner. You can find the award application forms at the Baldrige program’s Web site here.
If you have questions about the application or application process or would like to discuss getting outside support for the effort, click here.
If you’re new to Baldrige and want to test it out, or if you are doing an assessment for the first time, you should start by answering the questions in the Criteria’s Organizational Profile. Pal’s Business Excellence Institute is offering a free webinar on how to do that. Just click on the blue box on the right of this page to sign up.
The Profile asks general questions about the fundamentals: your products and services, culture, workforce profile, assets, regulatory requirements, structure, customers,…
17Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige 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. If your organization is submitting the assessment as an application, the size of the response is limited to 55 pages: five pages for the Profile and 50 pages for the responses to Categories 1 through…
9Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFREE WEBINAR: Focus Leaders on What Is Important with Baldrige Profile
Pal’s Business Excellence Institute is offering a free webinar on how to create an effective profile of your organization. Just click on the “Free Webinar” box on the right to sign up.
The Organizational Profile is the starting point for a Baldrige assessment. For some organizations new to the Baldrige Criteria, answering the questions in the Profile is their first self-assessment. The exercise helps identify opportunities for improvement in the fundamental areas that shape an organization such as culture, structure, and competitive environment. This free webinar will explain how you can use the completed Profile to focus your senior leadership team on what is important for your organization’s success.
Also during the 20-minute webinar, you will learn five keys to keeping your Profile simple but effective while featuring your strengths.
David McClaskey, cofounder and president of Pal’s BEI, will present the webinar. David has worked with seven companies that have won the Baldrige Award eight times, including 2010 winner K&N Management. Every company that he has consulted with for two or more years has won the Baldrige Award.
Pal’s Business Excellence Institute provides training and consulting based on the Baldrige principles and practices of Pal’s Sudden Service, which won the Baldrige Award in 2001. You can read more about Pal’s Sudden Service and how it has continued to grow and improve over the last ten years here.
If you have been curious about what a Baldrige assessment could do for your organization,…
3Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
