All Posts Tagged With: "learning"
Baldrige Model: How do your senior leaders lead?
Item 1.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how senior leaders lead. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for senior leaders to:
- Set, review, and refine your mission, vision, and values
- Deploy your vision and values throughout the organization
- Demonstrate their commitment to your values and to legal and ethical behavior, including promoting an organizational environment that requires legal and ethical behavior
- Create a sustainable organization that includes an environment for performance improvement and leadership, accomplishing your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, and agility
- Create a workforce culture focused on the customer
- Create a learning organization, including participating in organizational learning and developing and enhancing their leadership skills
- Conduct succession planning and develop future leaders
- Communicate with and engage the entire workforce including two-way communication, sharing key decisions, and participating in reward and recognition programs
- Create a focus on action to achieve the organization’s objectives, improve performance, and attain its vision
Best practices to consider:
- Senior leaders, including the president/CEO, are personally and actively involved in designing, implementing, improving, and following these key processes.
- Senior leaders align strategic plans and measurement systems with the organization’s mission and vision, and they talk about the mission and vision at every opportunity.
- Senior leaders demonstrate how they value learning by being teachers and learners, sharing knowledge and best practices throughout the organization, and pursuing continuous improvement in all areas of the organization.
- Senior leaders are inclusive, constantly sharing information with employees about direction, decisions, and performance.
Common problem areas:
- The actions…
Make Your Job Better with Baldrige
Innovation and Communication
Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:
- Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
- Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
- Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
- Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
- Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
- Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns of people.” Those insights are valuable to other parts of your organization, too.
- Build…
Managing for Innovation
Managing for innovation is a Baldrige core value. According to the Criteria, “innovation means making meaningful change to improve your products, services, programs, processes, operations, and business model to create new value for the organization’s stakeholders.”
It’s not just about being creative: It’s about making creative change. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Timble spent a decade studying innovation, writing a book that presents best practices for executing an innovation initiative called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. They asked thousands of executives at Fortune 500 companies to rate their companies’ innovation skills on a scale of one (poor) to ten (world-class). Generating ideas got an average score of 6. Commercializing them—turning ideas into meaningful change—received an average score of 1.
In other words, most organizations are pretty good at coming up with ideas and very bad at acting on them. To remedy this situation, Govindarajan and Timble devote their book to describing the nature and work of dedicated innovation teams because, as they note, “innovation is by nature non-routine and uncertain.”
You can get a jump on developing processes that solve the execution challenge by improving your responses to these key questions about innovation in the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders create an environment for innovation?
- How do you innovate product offerings to meet customer requirements?
- How do you select and use comparative data and information to support innovation?
- How do you translate organizational review findings into opportunities for innovation?
- How does your learning and development system address innovation?
- How do you innovate your overall work…
10 Questions to Ask about Everything You Do
The Baldrige Criteria ask how an organization operates. How do you do what you do? Whether the focus is on leadership, strategic planning, customers, measurement, employees, or process management, the questions peel apart the processes you use to get things done.
Before you can write a Baldrige or state award application, you must gather the information you need to answer the Criteria questions. That means interviewing internal subject matter experts about the six process categories and one results category in the Criteria. One way to prepare subject matter experts for these interviews is to reassure them that you will be discussing how they do what they do. A Baldrige assessment is, after all, a snapshot of how your organization operates.
Another step in the preparation is to describe the scope of the information you will be looking for by sharing 10 process questions that we should all be able to answer about the work we do:
- What is your approach to _(the area you are focusing on)_?
- How do you determine customer and stakeholder requirements for it?
- How systematic is your process?
- How do you deploy it to all units that should be using it?
- How is it aligned with your organization’s mission, vision, and goals?
- How is it innovative, transformational, or a role model for similar processes?
- How do you use data and information to evaluate and improve the process?
- How do you compare your performance on key process measures to that of other organizations?
- How do you review performance and use these reviews to improve your processes?
- How do you…
Learning, Teaching and Benchmarking
“Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?” asks business strategist Gary Hamel. Bill Taylor quotes Hamel in a thought-provoking article, “The Rise of the Teaching Organization” (HarvardBusiness.org, November 17, 2009). Taylor takes it a step further, stating “that the most determined innovators—the organizations with the most original ideas about how to compete and win—aren’t just committed to learning. They are just as committed to teaching.”
There’s ample evidence of that among Baldrige Award recipients. All winners are required to share information on their performance and strategies with other U.S. organizations. Many provide tours and offer workshops for interested leaders and use those workshops to identify best practices in other organizations. Several have formed consulting organizations to provide further support. They are teaching and, in the process, they are learning.
Taylor describes how Virginia Mason, a Seattle-based hospital system, became a healthcare leader by integrating the Toyota Production System. Last year, it created the Virginia Mason Institute to do what Baldrige Award recipients do: conduct tours, explain how they work, and share what they know. Its CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, said, “Part of our mission as a company is to help improve our industry. But the more we educate, the faster we move as well. This will spur us on, push us to keep getting better, and people will chase our taillights. Our credibility as a company is dependent on our ability to deliver results. By teaching others what we’ve learned, it forces us to keep learning.”
Organizational learning is a Baldrige…
23Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
Learning is a keystone in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational and personal learning is one of 11 Baldrige core values, and learning is one of four factors used to evaluate every process. According to the Criteria, “learning refers to:
- refining your approach through cycles of evaluation and improvement
- encouraging breakthrough change to your approach through innovation
- sharing refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization”
Plan-Do-Check-Act is a learning cycle. Organizations in which PDCA is a natural part of how they do things are learning organizations. “Organizations that have acquired the learning habit are endlessly seeking new methods or new products, forever testing and then reflecting, consciously or unconsciously pushing round that wheel,” wrote Charles Handy in Learning Organizations (Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, 1995).
Creating a learning organization means creating a climate in which learning is encouraged, assisted, applauded, and rewarded. It also means engaging employees in the learning process. Peter Senge, one of the gurus of systems thinking and learning organizations, wrote in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, “People learn most rapidly when they have a genuine sense of responsibility for their actions. Helplessness, the belief that we cannot influence the circumstances under which we live, undermines the incentive to learn, as does the belief that someone somewhere else dictates our actions.”
In high-performing organizations, employees feel responsible for their actions. They are engaged. They care about the quality of their work. They are eager to learn and, as a result, organizational learning flourishes. Learning is embedded in the way…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Steps to World Class
What are the characteristics of a high-performing organization? What do they do or how do they act to distinguish themselves? What can your organization do to join their ranks?
The Baldrige model has identified the beliefs and behaviors of high-performing organizations. These 11 core values and concepts, embedded in the Baldrige Criteria and in Baldrige Award recipients, are essential to achieving performance excellence. You can find the complete list here and an explanation of each in the Criteria booklets here.
So how do you get your organization from where it is today to world-class status? Twenty years of Baldrige reveal the steps you can take to create a high-performing organization:
- Lead the transformation. It won’t happen without leaders committed to excellence, and it won’t happen without recognizing that the steps you take will transform your organization. Plan the journey, communicate the plan, measure progress, and facilitate change.
♦To learn more, read Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization, 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership, and An Achievable Mission and Vision; - Develop management system experts. You will need these experts to help focus resources and attention on what must happen along your journey. Take a few existing or rising stars and ask them to be Baldrige or state award examiners for at least three years. The training and experience they get will give you the internal expertise you need.
♦To learn more, read How to Become a Baldrige Expert, Make Yourself More Valuable, and The Value of Baldrige Expertise. - Promote curiosity. No organization can change if it is content with the way things are.…
