Seeking Information about Baldrige

Baldrige.com is now getting more than 200 unique visitors a day and 80% of them find us through search engines. The top ten keyword searches are all variations of the word Baldrige such as Baldrige model, Baldrige Award, and Malcolm Baldrige, plus the most common misspelling of the word: “baldridge.”

If you are visiting us for the first time because you want to know what Baldrige is about, I invite you to check out these articles:

• What Is Baldrige?
• Baldrige 101
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How the Baldrige Award Works
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment

The core of the Baldrige program is the Baldrige Criteria, which identifies the critical elements of any management system through questions that help you assess how your organization operates. The Criteria have been refined every year for more than 20 years (click here to read more) to ensure that they address everything an organization must do to achieve performance excellence. The Criteria are built on a foundation of 11 core values (click here). When leaders ask whether integrating Baldrige is a good choice for their organization, I describe the core values. If you want your organization to reflect those values, then integrating Baldrige is a smart decision.

You integrate Baldrige by asking and answering the questions in the Criteria, identifying opportunities for improvement, and acting on those opportunities to improve performance. Most organizations that embrace Baldrige perform annual assessments until they win a Baldrige Award…

AtlantiCare’s Baldrige Journey

It’s always interesting to read about the journeys taken by Baldrige Award winners. This month’s Quality Progress describes AtlantiCare’s nearly decade-long integration of the Baldrige model, which resulted in receiving the Award in 2009.

Like a lot of organizations, it used the state award process first, receiving a bronze award from Quality New Jersey in 2001. It first applied for the Baldrige Award in 2006 but did not get a site visit. That came in 2007, and again in 2008, before the site visit in 2009 led to the Award. In the article, AtlantiCare’s president and CEO, David Tilton, said, “You don’t know how much work you have to do, but we knew we were not Baldrige worthy when we had our first site visit. We knew we could be better.” (“Jersey Score,” Brett Krzykowski, Quality Progress, September 2010).

Organizations that are new to the Baldrige Criteria often struggle with identifying their strategic challenges. It’s been my experience that most healthcare organizations have very similar challenges. With that in mind, here are AtlantiCare’s:

1. Engaging physicians in new models of collaboration and partnership.
2. Creating sustainable growth outside of the primary service area.
3. Identifying and prioritizing healthcare service opportunities for investment and recruitment.
4. Developing new business and care models to support and grow primary care.
5. Identifying and improving critical success factors for community health and wellness.
6. Increasing quality of care through clinical communication and transparency.
7. Using technology to improve patient safety and clinical quality.
8. Recruiting, training, and retaining…

What People Need to Hear

Integrating the Baldrige model means altering your management system. It means doing things differently than you’ve done them in the past. In the best cases, it is a transformative process that delivers short-term success and longer-term sustainability.

To get to that point, leaders need to manage the change. They need to help managers, supervisors, and employees understand why the change is necessary, how it will benefit them as well as the organization, how it will change what they do, and what will be expected of them. It requires profound knowledge of what people need to embrace the change and education and communication to make that happen.

In “Why Call It ‘Lean Manufacturing’?,” consultant Rick Bohan addresses this issue as it relates to the implementation of lean. His insights are equally relevant to Baldrige. As Bohan notes, “culture change always meets resistance, even under the most ideal circumstances.” A good part of that resistance can be overcome by effective communication, and that means understanding what your people hear when you describe your change initiative. Bohan describes the impact of introducing lean to managers and operators:

“When we speak of reduced costs, they hear, ‘Get rid of people.’ When we talk about increased efficiencies, they hear, ‘Work harder and faster.’ When we speak of the benefits of doing more with less, they hear, ‘Make more and better product but don’t expect anything from the company to help you.’ When we lecture about…

What Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners (Part 2)

In the first article in this series, I described two of the seven characteristics of organizations with sound management systems: (1) they think process and (2) they act on data. By winning the Baldrige Award, organizations demonstrate the effectiveness of their management systems through world-class results, a sampling of which you will find in the links at the end of this article.

Here, then, are the next three characteristics of these role-model organizations:

3. They know where they’re going. Yeah, I know, you’ve got a vision and a mission. Do you measure progress on them? Great companies know that what they’re doing today takes them further along the path to what they wish to become, and they don’t know it intuitively, they know it measurably. Today’s actions meet objectives that support strategies that realize the vision.

This interlinked structure is the product of careful research, thoughtful analyses, and ambitious goals. Dozens of people—sometimes hundreds of people—participate in the process of discovering what their company is, where it must go, how it can get there, and what will obstruct its progress. They repeat this process annually. When they’re done, they know individually and collectively where they are going. Even better, they know what they must do—individually and collectively, today and tomorrow—to get there.

4. They align activities. At most companies, if you strapped every employee into a harness and told them to pull, you wouldn’t get very far. Some would sit down…