The ladder is particularly helpful with coaching leaders on what they need to learn. Somebody has probably developed a behavior/skill checklist for slotting leaders into one of the ladder’s four rungs:

Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence. The leader is clueless about the subject, lacking almost any knowledge or skills. Worse yet, the leader is not aware of this weakness and, as a result, exudes confidence where none is warranted. We’ve all had leaders like this.

Level 2: Conscious Incompetence. The leader realizes his/her ability is limited and that others are much more competent in this area. The leader’s confidence plummets until learning takes place.

Level 3: Conscious Competence. The leader puts his/her learning into practice and gains confidence during the process.

Level 4: Unconscious Competence. Repeatedly applying the new knowledge and skills create new habits that allow the leader to perform confidently and without conscious effort.

All of us, including leaders, need someone to help us figure out where we are on this ladder for any given behavior or skill. A performance management system should do that for all employees. It should also provide the learning opportunities, development plans, incentives, and progress reviews that will help leaders and other employees improve and grow.

The New Age of REason has a fine table describing the characteristics of each level and what needs to be done to move up the ladder.

To read more about leadership, click on these articles:

• Young Blood in the Executive Suite
• Baldrige.com on Culture
• How to Be the Best
• Leading Also Means Managing
• What Great Organizations Achieve
• Leadership Matters Most

1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”

2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.

3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.

4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.

5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.

6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.

7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.

8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.

9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others and you would be smart to develop them.

10. Competing on Analytics. The data you collect can be turned into intelligence.

11. Reverse Innovation. I don’t know where the clever name came from, but what HBR is focusing on is the emergence of huge markets in India and China.

12. Sustainability. By which, HBR means going green, and it declares that 2010-2020 will be the decade of sustainability.

From a Baldrige perspective, listening to customers, managing risk, promoting innovation (creativity), focusing on strategies and governance, developing managers, converting data into knowledge and knowledge management, and pursuing sustainability would rank as influential management ideas because they key components of a systematic approach to performance excellence.

As for improving HBR’s list, I would suggest the past decade also saw the proliferation of Lean and Six Sigma as process improvement methodologies, the emphasis on agility to respond more quickly to a rapidly changing environment, and widespread acceptance of the balanced scorecard as a way to measure performance.

Here’s hoping the list ten years from now touts the Baldrige model as one of the decade’s most influential management ideas.

To find out more about these topics, read:

• 9 Ways to Get Closer to Customers
• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• Making Innovation Part of Your Culture
• Transforming Measurement
• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• 10 Steps to World-Class

Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:

• “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
• The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
• We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.

The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:

1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The Baldrige Criteria ask how “senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce” and how they “encourage frank, two-way communication.”
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Workforce engagement, which cannot thrive in a fearful environment, is the first Item in Category 5 of the Criteria.
6. Reinvent the means of control. Control systems such as those of two-time Baldrige Award recipient The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company prepare each employee to make the best decisions.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The Baldrige Criteria define the work of senior leaders throughout the first Category.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. The Criteria ask: “How do you ensure that your organizational culture benefits from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?”
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. The strategic planning Category defines a robust process for developing strategies.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. Agility, a core value of the Baldrige model, is characterized by the capacity for rapid change and flexibility, which help large organizations become more adaptable and innovative.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Integrating the Baldrige model is a transformative journey aimed at achieving results rather than sustaining the status quo.
12. Share the work of setting direction. The second part of the strategic planning Category involves deploying the strategic plan, which involves everyone in goal setting to support the organization’s goals and action plans.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. The Baldrige model promotes a balanced scorecard approach both in Category 4 and in the scope of the results it requires.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Another Baldrige core value is a focus on the future to create a sustainable organization.
15. Create a democracy of information. The Criteria ask how “you make needed data and information available and accessible.”
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Empowering employees is the result of “an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce,” which is a focus of the Baldrige Criteria.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. See The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. The Baldrige Criteria go a step farther, using the strategic planning process to allocate resources that will enable the organization to achieve its action plans.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. The Criteria promote open, two-way communication, and Award recipients have used innovative approaches to capture the collective wisdom of their entire organizations.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. The strategic planning Category asks multiple questions about how you identify, discuss, and select your strategic objectives and action plans.
21. Further unleash human imagination. The Criteria ask how “you manage and organize your workforce to accomplish the work of your organization.”
22. Enable communities of passion. Again, employee engagement is supported in several Baldrige Categories.
23. Retool management for an open world. The Criteria ask about “the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competitors” and about opportunities for innovation and collaboration.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. “Valuing workforce members and partners” is a Baldrige core value.
25. Retrain managerial minds. The Criteria ask several questions about leadership development.

It’s clear that any organization wishing to tackle these “moonshots for management” would do well to conduct a Baldrige assessment and integrate the Baldrige model.

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