All Posts Tagged With: "leadership"
Building a Community of Excellence
Saint Joseph, Missouri, plans to become a Community of Excellence. St. Joseph is the home of 2009 Baldrige Award winner Heartland Health, which I’ve written about here and here. Its CEO, Dr. Mark Laney, recently spoke at an annual event for area business leaders about what they could do to achieve the quality standards and performance of Heartland, which was described in the St. Joseph News-Press here.
The announcement of St. Joseph’s intent to become a Community of Excellence followed Dr. Laney’s speech. The concept has gained traction about three hours away in Columbia, Missouri, which is the home of another Baldrige Award winner, MidwayUSA. Its CEO, Larry Potterfield, has helped organize a community excellence initiative it calls a Baldrige Performance Excellence Group. I wrote about Columbia’s effort here. The group has produced a BPEG booklet that provides a blueprint for creating your own Community of Excellence including how to start your own BPEG, how to structure it, who to involve, events, bylaws, dues, and key processes. You can read the booklet here (pdf). In the preface to the booklet, Harry Hertz, director of the Baldrige National Quality Program, wrote, “Monthly meetings, and the local networks and contacts that are developed, are a key to helping organizations get on track, stay on track, and accelerate their journey to performance excellence. The support provided by these community groups should lead to mutual learning and breakthrough improvements for their members.”
One of…
13Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhere Are the Disconnects in Your Organization?
This year, Baldrige examiners were asked to assess their organizations using the Baldrige program’s questionnaires: “Are We Making Progress as Leaders?” for examiners who work in management or “Are We Making Progress?” for examiners who do not. The questionnaires ask for level of agreement with statements related to the Baldrige Criteria, in the case of employees, or their perceptions of their organizations, in the case of leaders.
In a few areas, the 173 employees and 294 leaders who took the test differed significantly. These disconnects suggest problems with processes, communication, or both:
- Know how to measure work quality: 78% of employees said they know how while 51% of leaders agreed that they do
- Use work quality measures to make improvements: 74% of employees said they did while 43% of leaders agreed
- Customers are satisfied with work performed: 85% of employees agreed compared to 69% of employees
- My boss and organization care about me: 69% of employees agreed compared to 84% of leaders
It’s important to note that the employees and leaders who answered the questionnaire do not, for the most part, work at the same organizations. And the employees in the group are Baldrige examiners: One would expect them to know how to measure work quality and use those measure to make improvements. If the questionnaires were administered to leaders and employees in one organization, the results might be different.
You can test that theory by rolling out the questionnaire in your…
9Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige 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:
- 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 Award winner.
- Eliminate unnecessary complexity. One of the benefits of evaluating your management system using the Baldrige model is that it reveals unnecessary complexity, exposing issues for senior leaders to prioritize and address.
- Transform in the right…
Baldrige Model: What are your senior leadership and governance results?
Item 7.4 in the Baldrige Criteria asks for your senior leadership and governance results. The following examples from Baldrige Award-winning applications show strong current levels, positive trends, and positive comparisons to key benchmarks. To read the descriptions of these measures and to see a broader range of Item 7.4 measures, go to the Results category responses of Baldrige Award-winner applications here. Chart numbers may not correspond to the Item number because of changes to the Criteria.
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:
- 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.
- People learn while observing others. Assign new employees to successful work groups so they can experience “vicarious success.”
- People need encouragement, support, and mentoring. “Research suggests that the single most powerful predictor of human resilience is interpersonal support.”
- People need basic training in how to…
Baldrige.com Joins Alltop
Baldrige.com has been selected to join the ranks of top leadership sites at Alltop, which lists the headlines for the top sites in a number of categories. Unfortunately, Alltop doesn’t list these sites alphabetically so you have to scroll down to the bottom of the leadership page here to find us.
Take a moment to browse the listings and you will notice that 90% or more of the content of these sites focuses on the personal side of leadership with topics such as “10 No-Brainer Ways to Become a Better Leader,” “6 Tips to Set Goals That Will Get You Where You Want to Go,” and “Job Search and Person-to-Person Networking.”
Baldrige.com is different. The information we provide focuses on how to develop a more effective management system: Information you need to build the organization you want. As Alltop shows, it’s easy to find websites that tell you how to improve your leadership style but harder to find sites that tell you how to improve your leadership system.
Baldrige.com now offers more than 550 articles on all aspects of performance excellence as defined by the Baldrige model. Fundamental information is listed in the second column on this page while most of the articles are organized by Baldrige category, Baldrige process and Award, and sector—the tabs at the top of the page. You can find a sample of what Baldrige.com has to offer by clicking on a recent summary article, “What…
17Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMake 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:
- Have we set clear and high targets? Will the target cause us to change our behavior?
- 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?
- 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!
- Are leaders being role models of the desired behavior? Not modeling it gives employees permission not to follow it either.
- Have we practiced behavior using role-play?
- Do we have a good measure of success?
- Can we report results of the verification of success transparently? Transparency reveals who is succeeding and who needs to improve.
- Are we giving positive feedback…
