Baldrige and Superior Execution

The answer: The Baldrige model.

The question: How do you solve the top CEO challenge identified by The Conference Board for the last five years?

That challenge is superior execution. According to an article by Accenture in June 2011, available here: “As companies resume the quest for profitable growth and high performance in the upturn, they can no longer afford to ignore the role of process in delivering value to their customers.”

The Baldrige model is a process model. Six of the seven categories in the model ask how you do what you do and what you do to manage and improve those processes, and the seventh category asks for the results of your processes. Companies that integrate the Baldrige model have identified their key processes, understand their value streams, align work with strategy, focus on what is truly important for success, and continually improve their processes. They use Baldrige to achieve what Accenture believes is a four-step journey to process management:

1. Link strategy with execution. The Baldrige model demands alignment of processes with stakeholder requirements, action plans with strategies and objectives, and strategies with the company’s mission and vision. If you want first-hand experience with the power of alignment, read the application summary of a…

Baldrige Promotes Resilience

No matter what your organization does, it must be resilient to overcome adversity, whether that adversity comes from a recessionary economy, global competition, runaway healthcare costs, or shrinking budgets in education and government. Baldrige Award winners exemplify resiliency through visionary leadership, employee engagement, open communication, and a focus on the future.

George S. Everly, Jr., PhD is associate professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, executive director of Resiliency Science Institutes, and author of Resilient Leadership: When Failure Is Not an Option. In “Building a Resilient Organizational Culture,” he writes that “just as individuals can learn to develop personal traits of resilience, so too can organizations develop a culture of resilience.” This occurs when key leaders demonstrate four core attributes of optimism, decisiveness, integrity, and open communication. When a few leaders model these behaviors, Everly notes, “we believe they have the ability to change an entire culture of an organization as others replicate the resilient characteristics they have observed.”

The framework for changing the culture addresses four areas:

1. People prosper from success. Create an environment that makes it possible for people to succeed, especially early in their careers, and then increase the difficulty and complexity of tasks.
2. People learn while observing others. Assign new…

Make Change Happen: 10 Questions

Bob Murphy of Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, recently emailed ten questions to use when beginning a new process or evaluating an existing one. The focus of the questions is as much on changing behavior as it is on process improvement. Studer likes to talk about “hardwiring excellence” in healthcare. These ten questions can help any organization in any industry improve performance:

1. Have we set clear and high targets? Will the target cause us to change our behavior?
2. Have we provided education/training to all involved in designing or improving the process? Are we over-communicating the “why” behind the intended behavior or improvement?
3. Has leadership made it clear that the behavior or new/improved process is mandatory, not optional? Studer Group research of over 2000 healthcare leaders indicates that when you use the word MANDATORY, 98% of employees understand that they MUST do the behavior (or follow the process). When you use the word REQUIRED, only 68% recognize that they MUST do it, and when you use the word EXPECTED, only 26% understand that they must do it. So be clear: This is mandatory!
4. Are leaders being role models of the desired behavior? Not modeling it gives employees permission not to follow it either.
5. Have…

Corporate Social Responsibility Is Unstoppable

“While consumer power for a better world is still nascent, it’s poised to skyrocket. Consumer pressure will greatly expand the breadth and depth of CSR, forcing companies to willfully change their practices,” writes Simon Mainwaring in his new book, We First, excerpted here in Fast Company. (Note: If you want proof that the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement Mainwaring describes has gone mainstream, consider that his book is ranked #19 for all books on Amazon.)

According to Mainwaring:

• 83% of consumers are willing to change their consumption habits if it can help make tomorrow’s world a better place to live.
• 61% have sought a brand that supports a good cause even if it was not the cheapest brand.
• 64% would recommend a brand that supports a good cause, up from 52% last year.
• 56% believe the interests of society and the interests of businesses should have equal weight in business decisions.
• 67% would switch brands if a different brand of similar quality supported a good cause.

The data point to a warning for companies that choose to ignore CSR and to an opportunity for those that embrace it. More and more consumers are factoring corporate social responsibility into their buying decisions.

Mainwaring believes the consumer drive for CSR will…