1. Answering the Criteria questions will give you a new and deeper understanding of how your organization works—or doesn’t work.
2. Getting feedback from the Baldrige or state program will help you identify strengths you can build upon and opportunities for improvement.
3. Acting on what you learn during #1 and #2 will make you a better organization.

I described the application process in an earlier article. In this article, I want to discuss the feedback you receive when you submit an application.

First, a quick overview of what happens to a Baldrige application after you submit it. (State programs follow a similar process.) Trained examiners are assigned to evaluate and comment on the application. A team of examiners then reviews the application and observations by conference call to reach consensus on your strengths, opportunities for improvement, and scores. If the Panel of Judges does not select your organization for a site visit, one of the examiners on the consensus team produces your feedback report. If you do receive a site visit, the site visit team leader finalizes your feedback report after the judges decide who should receive the Award.

The feedback report begins by identifying the key themes both for the process Items, which are Categories 1 through 6, and the results Item, which is Category 7. It lists your most important strengths or outstanding practices and your most significant opportunities, concerns, vulnerabilities, and gaps.

The bulk of the report details your strengths and opportunities for improvement (OFIs) for each of the Criteria’s 18 Items. Applicants will tell you that the greatest benefit of applying for a Baldrige or state award is these OFIs. Cargill Corn Milling, which received the Baldrige Award last year, got 131 of them in its feedback report—and it won the Award! Getting a list of important areas to improve, agreed upon by consensus of trained examiners, offers priceless insight into the things you need to work on to achieve performance excellence.

If a high-performing company like Cargill Corn Milling can learn from the application process, imagine the value of the feedback to an organization that has more to learn, and more to gain.

You can find Baldrige Award application forms here. To learn more about a state award program, click here.

The plant manager for Cargill Corn Milling was asked how his organization prioritizes the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) it gets from the Baldrige feedback and from Cargill’s Business Excellence process. He noted that they got a total of 131 OFIs from the 2008 feedback reports. Their leadership group used a priority matrix to rank the OFIs based on their importance to Cargill Corn Milling’s mission, vision, and purpose. They then decided to work on the top three OFIs this year.

For people new to Baldrige, a couple of things may be surprising about this. First is the fact that a Baldrige Award recipient got 131 OFIs. What you have to remember is that recipients typically score in the 650 to 750 point range. The missing 250-350 points are OFIs. There are no “perfect” organizations.

The second surprise is that, out of 131 OFIs, the organization is working on just three. I think that’s misleading. In my experience, improving performance on those top three OFIs will lead to improvement on several others. For example, addressing an OFI that questions how systematically you improve your work processes will also address all of the OFIs in other Categories that raised that issue for individual processes. Besides, no organization has the resources to tackle 131 problems and still conduct their daily business.

As all of the speakers stated, the Baldrige process is not about the Baldrige Award: It’s about continuous improvement. And that’s why they welcome their OFIs.

Help grow our community:

The answer is, “Yes–but very few.”

The poster child for Baldrige failures is Wallace Company, a family-owned pipe and valve distributor that received the Award in 1990 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January of 1992. A consultant brought in to turn the company around said, “Instead of shoring up, officials spent time leading tours through the firm and on the lecture circuit.”

I remember sitting in on a conference call in the summer of 1991 between the leaders of Zytec, a Minnesota power supply manufacturer, and the man who led Wallace’s Baldrige effort. Zytec had applied for the Baldrige Award and been notified that it would receive a site visit. Its leaders wanted to know how to prepare for it so they called Wallace.

The Wallace guy talked about how they schmoozed the Baldrige examiners. I don’t remember the litany of perks they provided but I do remember thinking I wished I had been one of those examiners. The Wallace guy took obvious pride in their approach.

When the call ended, the Zytec leaders looked at each other for a moment before the CEO said what they all were surely thinking, “Well, we’re certainly not going to do that.” They believed they should win the Award on their company’s merits and they did. And the company continues to thrive today as part of Emerson Network Power.

When I get the “gotcha” question, I tell the Wallace story but I also talk about the improvements made to the process as a result. The Baldrige program tightened its restrictions on what site visit companies can give examiners and what examiners can accept. And the Baldrige Criteria started asking about how applicants planned to sustain their high performance.

I also point out that, while Baldrige Award recipients are very good, they are far from perfect. Their feedback reports include dozens of opportunities for improvement. Most recipients seize these opportunities and strengthen their organizations.

Wallace didn’t. It remains one of the few exceptions.