All Posts Tagged With: "Criteria"
The Fundamentals of Greatness
It’s a Baldrige message: Greatness is about the fundamentals. As Jon Gordon, author of Training Camp: What the Best Do Better Than Everyone Else (Wiley, 2009), said, “the companies that focus on the basics are the ones that survive when times get tough.”
Small Business Digest recently ran a story about the book that included Gordon’s tips for getting back to the basics:
- Be willing to outwork everyone else. As Gordon said, “Talent matters, but perseverance matters more.” He also advises companies to stay the course “long enough to become the best at what they do.” That’s the Baldrige process in a nutshell.
- Get the little things right. According to Gordon, “The best take action every day and do the common tasks…with uncommon focus, dedication, and a commitment to excellence.”
- Don’t lower your standards when no one’s looking. “Being the best is all about forming good habits,” said Gordon.
- Don’t focus on outcomes. Gordon, who has worked with two NFL teams as well as businesses, a hospital, and the FBI, believes organizations should focus on purpose and process to fuel their growth and “stay in the moment.”
- Whatever you do, don’t rest on proverbial laurels. The solution, Gordon said, “is to stay humble and hungry.”
In a world of quick fixes and programs du jour, the endless journey to excellence of Baldrige organizations stands out for their commitment to getting the fundamentals, which are laid out in the Baldrige Criteria, right.
The results they achieve by staying the course validate…
2Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIntroducing 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 for Long-Term Care/Assisted Living Facilities
To promote performance excellence among its member facilities, the American Health Care Association (AHCA) and National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) introduced the AHCA/NCAL National Quality Award in 1996. The Award is modeled after the Baldrige Award and uses the Criteria in one form or another to evaluate applicants at three levels:
- Step 1 applicants basically respond to the Organizational Profile.
- Step 2 applicants respond to questions organized around the 11 Baldrige core values.
- Step 3 applicants write a full Baldrige application (although they’re only given 44 pages to do so, which makes no sense to me)
The ACHA/NCAL award program has done a terrific job of inspiring its member facilities to participate in the program. In 2009, 439 facilities received Step 1 recognition, 26 earned Step 2 recognition, and three facilities (of 19 that applied at Step 3 level) achieved the highest honor. Application deadlines (all applications are online) are the end of February for Step 1 and the end of March for Steps 2 and 3.
This year’s Step 3 award recipients are Madonna Living Community in Rochester, Minnesota; St. Gertrude’s Health & Rehabilitation Center in Shakopee, Minnesota; and ElderWood Health Care at Wedgewood in Amherst, New York.
You can find out more about the program by visiting the ACHA/NCAL National Quality Award Web site.
20Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedProcess Management: Work System Design
Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken part in designing a work system? I didn’t think so.
The Baldrige Criteria (6.1a1) ask how you do this. It defines work system as “how the work of your organization is accomplished.” No organization can exist without a work system, which evolves over the life of the organization from the informality of a new venture to the policies and procedures of an established organization. Unless you’re starting a new organization by intentionally designing your work system, the opportunity to do so quickly passes.
Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t redesign your work system as the organization grows and changes. I think that’s what the Criteria should focus on, the redesigning and improving and not the designing.
Applicants tend to punt this question. Here’s how 2008 recipient Poudre Valley Health System answered it: “PVHS designs and innovates its work systems to achieve its world-class vision and meet its customer requirements through the Strategy Development & Deployment process.” That’s it, and that’s about as much as most organizations offer.
Almost the same argument can be made for another question (6.2a1) about how you design your work processes. While it’s true that new processes may be created to meet new needs, the vast majority of an organization’s processes already exist. The focus, therefore, is on redesign and improvement rather than on designing new processes. Yet the Criteria ask three rather detailed questions about something most…
14Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCustomer Focus: The Freedom to Ask Stupid Questions
One of the great things about doing a Baldrige assessment is the freedom it gives you to ask stupid questions, the kinds of questions nobody would normally ask because their coworkers would snicker. Simple questions about things everybody’s supposed to know.
Here’s a good Criteria question: How do you identify customer groups and market segments?
Here’s another: How do you determine customer dissatisfaction?
Or: How do you acquire new customers?
In my experience, these “stupid” questions are the most important questions you will answer because nobody’s given them much thought for a long time and they are fundamental to your success. Answering them forces you to describe your processes, an exercise that often reveals serious gaps and great opportunities.
One of the drawbacks of doing an assessment without outside help is the tendency to trot out the “common knowledge” answers to these simple questions without thinking about them. After all, your people are expected to know these things. As an external consultant, I had the freedom to ask the “stupid” questions because I wasn’t expected to know anything. I also had the responsibility to push hard for the processes that answered them, which often produced “Aha!” moments when no process could be found or holes in the existing process were exposed.
You can gain the same insights on your own by assigning someone who is not in a customer-facing department to find the answers to the customer questions. For example, put…
5Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWorkforce Focus: Hating Cat 5
I dislike Category 5 in the Baldrige Criteria. Workforce Focus. By the time I get to it I’ve already plodded through the Profile, Leadership (my second least favorite Category), Strategic Planning, Customer Focus, and Measurement. If this was a marathon, Category 5 would be “the wall.”
First, it’s long and unwieldy. If you break down the components of every Area to Address in Items 5.1 and 5.2, you conceivably have more than 80 questions to answer. And you’ll have to answer them concisely because you’ll only get six or seven pages to do it in. That’s 12 or 13 questions per page. Stick a graphic in, which a lot of examiners like, and each answer is maybe a paragraph long.
Example: 5.1a(2) How do you foster an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication?
Your response has to fit in a space less than the first two paragraphs of this post. Of course, you can make it longer, but then another response must be shorter. You now have less than seven pages to respond to the other 79 questions.
Second, Category 5 covers too much ground. You start with creating an organizational culture and then move to your performance management system, learning and development system (for leaders and the rest of the workforce), assessing workforce engagement, assessing workforce capability and capacity, getting and keeping employees, diversity, managing and organizing your workforce, improving safety and security, and providing policies,…
30Jul2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
