All Posts Tagged With: "core competencies"
Strategic Planning Definitions
On his Church of the Customer blog, Ben McConnell defined common strategic planning terms that often confuse people. I’ve sprinkled in the Baldrige definitions of related terms to provide a guide to the language of strategic planning, with CoC for Ben’s definition and BC for a definition from the Baldrige Criteria.
Mission. The overall function of an organization. It answers the question, “What are we attempting to accomplish?” (BC)
Vision. The desired future state of your organization—where it’s headed, what it intends to be, or how it wishes to be perceived in the future. (BC)
Values. The guiding principles and behaviors that embody how your organization and its people are expected to operate. (BC)
Core Competencies. Your organization’s areas of greatest expertise, those strategically important capabilities that are central to fulfilling your mission or provide an advantage in your marketplace. (BC)
Strategic Challenges. Those pressures that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)
Strategic Advantages. Those marketplace benefits that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)
Objective. A high-level achievement, like “improve customer loyalty” or “grow market share.” Objectives sit at the top of the strategic plan, and an ideal plan has no more than a handful…
14Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Process Management
The Baldrige Criteria describe a process model. Six of the seven Criteria Categories ask powerful questions about the key processes necessary to operate a high-performing organization. Your responses to those questions are evaluated based on the effectiveness of your approaches, how widely and consistently they are deployed, how systematically they are refined, and how well they are aligned with your organizational needs.
The Process Management Category asks how you design your work systems and how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes. The best way to evaluate how well you do this is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve process management, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you design and innovate your overall work system (how the work of your organization is accomplished)?
- How do your work systems and key work processes (your most important internal value creation processes) relate to and capitalize on your core competencies?
- What are your key work processes?
- How do you determine the key requirements for these processes and what are they?
- How do you design and innovate your…
10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
In previous articles we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization’s leadership and its key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve strategic planning, here are 10 questions to ask and answer about your strategic planning process:
- How do you conduct strategic planning including the key strategic planning process steps and participants in the process?
- How do you identify potential blind spots during this process?
- How do you ensure that strategic planning addresses: (a) your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); (b) potential major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; (c) long-term organizational sustainability; and (d) your ability to execute the strategic plan?
- What are your current strategic objectives, the goals for each, and the timetable for achieving them?
- How do these objectives address your strategic challenges and advantages, opportunities for innovation, core competencies, and the needs of all stakeholders?
- How do you…
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…
Know Your Value Proposition
The Baldrige Criteria ask: “What are the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competencies?” In marketing terms, this is your value proposition, the reason a customer should buy your product or use your service instead of a competitor’s.
According to Anthony Tjan (“Value Propositions that Work,” Harvard Business Publishing, September 14, 2009), there are only four categories of value propositions that work:
- Best quality
- Best bang for the buck
- Luxury and aspiration
- Must-have
If you think of a market or industry leader, you can probably figure out the category of its value proposition. Whole Foods = best quality. Wal-Mart = best bang for the buck. Ritz-Carlton = luxury and aspiration. Apple iPhone = must-have.
An organization that knows its value proposition has a competitive advantage because it must understand and build upon its core competencies to produce its signature value, align people and processes to provide that value, and communicate that value to customers, employees, and the public to establish and sustain its leadership.
And then it must deliver on its value proposition. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients is that they know who they are. They are clear about their vision and mission and they understand and can articulate their value proposition.
Recent…
14Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?
It’s one of the first questions in the Baldrige Criteria. Few organizations have a good answer.
The Baldrige Criteria define core competencies as “your organization’s areas of greatest expertise…strategically important capabilities…central to your mission or provide an advantage,” that are frequently “challenging for competitors to imitate and provide a sustainable competitive advantage.”
What do you do better than your competitors that gives you an edge in your market?
Here’s an example from Richland College (RLC), the first and only community college to receive the Baldrige Award. Located in Dallas, Texas, RLC serves a multicultural student body of 14,500 students seeking college credits and another 6,000 continuing education students.
RLC has identified four core competencies:
- Seamless transitions for lifelong learning
- Leader-full, values-inspired agility and innovation
- Development and engagement of faculty and staff
- Sustainable community building – the triple bottom line
You will see evidence of processes RLC uses to take advantage of these core competencies in its award application summary and results that affirm that these are, indeed, RLC’s areas of expertise. Case in point: All employees have career-development plans that, for those employees encouraged to pursue senior leadership positions, include training, internships, and filling in for senior leaders when they are out. As a result, 22 former RLC employees have been named…
2Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLocking in the Keystones
A “keystone” is the central supporting element of a whole. I believe a high-performing organization has five keystones: (1) mission and vision; (2) core competencies; (3) customer knowledge; (4) organizational learning; and (4) alignment and integration.
I will be posting pages on each of these five keystones. You can look for links to them in the “Pages” column on the home page. As with all posts and pages, I welcome your feedback.
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