All Posts Tagged With: "leadership"
A Systematic Approach to Change
The decision to do a Baldrige assessment is a decision to change the organization. Questions will be asked that prompt leaders to reconsider the way they do things. Gaps in the day-to-day conduct of business will be exposed. Unacceptable results will shine light on ineffective processes. Cursed with new knowledge, senior leaders can either ignore it and accept that the current management system is unable to achieve the results they desire or embrace change.
The opportunities for improvement revealed by a Baldrige assessment contain the logic for acting upon them: Your results are flat or negative because this or that process is broken. Fix the process and improve your results. Measure your progress. Validate it with your customers. Repeat.
Unfortunately, the logic of the change is usually lost to everyone but the leaders who enact it, which can render it ineffective. In a recent article on Forbes, author Carol Kinsey Goman explains why human beings resist change. According to brain analysis technology, our work habits are controlled by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. When we do things the way we’ve always done them, we feel good. Change stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to the amygdala, which controls our “fight or flight” response. When change overwhelms the prefrontal cortex, the amygdale triggers physical and psychological disorientation and pain. Even if we know logically that a change is necessary and positive, our brains can react negatively.
Goman offers six suggestions for helping your workforce handle change:
- Trust people to see the…
Baldrige Is a Continuous Improvement Program
Those leaders who decide to give Baldrige a spin often focus on the obvious step: conducting a Baldrige assessment. Some may apply for a state award or the Baldrige Award, but most do an internal assessment, which identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement. If the assessment is done right and professionally evaluated, the list of opportunities is long—much longer than any organization can address is one year. As a result, too many organizations only conduct that one assessment, thus missing their opportunity to build a world-class management system.
Baldrige Award winners integrate Baldrige by performing regular—usually annual—Baldrige assessments. The process of producing assessments and prioritizing and acting on the opportunities they reveal institutionalizes a culture of continuous improvement. It keeps everyone focused on what is most important for the organization to grow and excel. It improves the alignment of people and processes with the organization’s goals, objectives, and strategies. Best of all, it delivers results, as the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners show.
IndustryWeek recently reported on a survey it conducted with TBM Consulting about the impact of continuous-improvement programs on three financial metrics: anticipated revenue growth, operating income growth, and cash flow over the past year. “Across the board, companies with no continuous improvement programs performed worse across all three measures,” Jill Jusko concluded here:
- More than 50% of respondents with no continuous improvement program said they expect revenue growth to be 3% or less in 2012, compared to fewer than 20% of companies with mature continuous improvement programs.
- Nearly half of…
Baldrige Expands Reach to Small Businesses
The Baldrige program is expanding its reach to small businesses through a new collaboration with the Alliance for Performance Excellence and The Alternative Board (TAB). The Alliance is a nonprofit network of national, state, and local Baldrige-based award programs. TAB provides peer advisory boards and coaching services for small business leaders.
According to a press release from the Baldrige program, the state programs will work with TAB boards across the country to help small business operators learn the Baldrige Criteria and use the Criteria to assess and improve performance.
The new effort drew praise from Terry May, president of MESA Products, a 2006 Baldrige Award recipient in the small business category. “TAB is a great resource for learning and sharing with my peers,” May said, “providing real-world, practical guidance to help me improve and grow my business. The Baldrige process, both at the state and national levels, helped me take MESA to an even higher level of performance and achieve breakthrough results. So, a partnership between local TAB boards and state Baldrige programs will be a great resource for small businesses.”
The collaboration between the Baldrige program and the Alliance is another indicator of the new relationship between the programs. Earlier this month, the Baldrige program announced new conditions that basically require organizations to earn state recognition before applying for the Baldrige Award (more here). Strengthening the relationship is an important step in maintaining the viability of the Baldrige program in the face of federal funding cuts.
29Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHuge Health System Wins 2011 Baldrige Award
Kudos to the leaders at Henry Ford Health System, one of four Baldrige Award winners in 2011. It is very challenging for an organization to make the necessary systemic changes to produce repeatable world-class results. It is especially challenging when that organization has 140 sites: seven hospitals, 33 multispecialty ambulatory care centers, affiliated physician practices, a research and education component, the Health Alliance Plan (health insurance coverage for more than 467,000 members), and 91 community care operations.
Henry Ford Health System serves a three-county region encompassing Detroit and its suburbs with a workforce just shy of 30,000 employees, physicians, and volunteers. Its revenue in 2010 was $4.08 billion.
It’s hard to imagine the effort it has taken to keep this massive organization moving along the Baldrige path, but its results are a testament to its leaders’ tenacity:
- Rated #1 for member satisfaction among all health insurance plans in Michigan by J.D. Powers and Associates
- Satisfaction exceeding 90th percentile level for HFHS’s medical centers, with 80% likely to recommend
- Performance on CMS core measures at the 90th percentile for 75% of reporting areas across the system’s seven inpatient hospitals
- Evidence-based global harm campaign to improve patient safety recognized as a national best practice by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement
- Market leader in the area it serves, increasing inpatient market share by an average of 3% a year since 2004
- Maintained a positive net operating income despite significant increases in uncompensated care—approximately $200 million in 2010
- HFHS’s leaders model and support entrepreneurism throughout the healthcare delivery system
- Best-in-class innovations including the Perfect Depression Program,…
Creating a Customer Culture
It’s always refreshing to hear a company that excels at serving customers describe its approach, especially when that company is in an industry that generally treats its customers like cattle.
Hawaiian Airlines has ranked among the leaders in customer service for years and is routinely ranked first by the US Department of Transportation for on-time performance and fewest cancellations. Charles Nardello oversees aircraft, flight, and customer service operations at Hawaiian Airlines. In a recent article on the HBR Blog Network, he discusses how the airline improved operational performance while maintaining service excellence, citing three things a company must do well “to maintain an unbeatable level of operational excellence: (1) Get very close to their customer; (2) Benchmark against itself on a consistent basis; and, (3) Empower employees to address the unexpected.”
A customer focus permeates Hawaiian Airlines. “For every decision we make, from the most basic to the complex, the customer always comes first—they are the driver of our decision-making and strategic planning,” writes Nardello. A culture that brings the customer perspective to every decision acts far differently than a company where customers are an afterthought or are only considered when addressing customer issues.
Hawaiian Airlines has an independent agency survey customers every month on their experiences with the airline and factors the results into every employee’s bonus pay. “Every employee receives a scorecard rating them on how well they’ve performed in interacting directly with the customer or, in the case of senior executives, on decision-making and strategic planning,” Nardello writes. It’s an approach…
14Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReach Your Goals with Baldrige.com
This is the 600th article to be posted on Baldrige.com, providing “the information you need to build the organization you want” since July 2009. Whether you’re a new visitor to the site—and there have been 9,000 visitors in the past month—or you’ve been here before, this is how Baldrige.com can help you:
- Get the results you want: It will help your organization achieve performance excellence whether you are in healthcare, manufacturing, service, education, nonprofit, or government.
- Learn about all aspects of the Baldrige model. Just click on one of the tabs at the top of this page to learn more about these key areas.
- Find out how to integrate Baldrige. Any type or size of organization can achieve world-class results by integrating the Baldrige model. We explain how to do it.
- Identify your top opportunities for improvement. A Baldrige assessment gives you a detailed snapshot of your entire management system, exposing your opportunities for improvement. We describe how to conduct an assessment and provide consulting support, if needed.
- Close the gaps. Baldrige.com has hundreds of articles about specific areas of concern. For example, you will find more than 75 articles about leadership alone, not to mention the free report on Baldrige Award-Winning Leadership now available (sign up on the right of this page).
- Become a valued expert. An organization is a complicated system with many moving parts. Baldrige.com can help you identify, organize, and improve those parts to reach your personal and organizational goals.
Thanks for making Baldrige.com the #1 source for “the information you need to build the organization you want.”
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3Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedValue of Baldrige Validated — Again
Thomson Reuters released a report this week on a study that demonstrates that “hospitals using the Baldrige process exhibit significantly higher rates of improvement in balanced organizational performance than non-Baldrige hospitals.”
The study confirms what similar studies of business performance have also shown. No matter what their organizations do, leaders need to consider these results and, if their organizations are not integrating Baldrige, ask how they, too, can achieve similar high rates of improvement.
Thomson Reuters uses independent public data to measure hospital performance and identify the national benchmarks for balanced excellence. It publishes the best 3% in an annual list of 100 Top Hospitals. For this study, it measured the association between 38 Baldrige hospitals (Award winners plus site-visit hospitals that gave permission) and 100 Top Hospitals on key indicators of performance and improvement. The analysis showed:
- Substantial agreement between the results of the Baldrige process and the Top 100 Hospitals award: Baldrige hospitals are significantly more likely than their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals award.
- Baldrige hospitals were significantly more likely than their peers to display faster five-year performance improvement.
- Baldrige hospitals were about 83% more likely than non-Baldrige hospitals to be awarded a 100 Top Hospitals award for excellence.
- Baldrige hospitals outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on nearly all of the individual measures of performance used in the 100 Top Hospitals composite score including risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications index, patient safety index, CMS core measures score, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and adjusted operating profit margin.
You can read the Thomson Reuters report here.
You…
27Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
