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:

1. What is your approach to _(the area you are focusing on)_?
2. How do you determine customer and stakeholder requirements for it?
3. How systematic is your process?
4. How do you deploy it to all units that should be using it?
5. How is it aligned with your organization’s mission, vision, and goals?
6. How is it innovative, transformational, or a role model for similar processes?
7. How do you use data and information to evaluate and improve the process?
8. How do you compare your performance on key process measures to that of other organizations?
9. How do you review performance and use these reviews to improve your processes?
10. How do you…

KEYSTONE: 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…

10 Critical Questions: Results

The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:

• Financial
• Customer
• Workforce

Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.

The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:

What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:

1. Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
2. Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction, dissatisfaction, relationship building, and engagement?
3. Financial performance?
4. Market or marketplace performance?
5. Workforce engagement and satisfaction?
6. Workforce and leader development?
7. The operational performance of your work systems and key work processes?
8. Regulatory and legal compliance and ethical behavior?
9. For each of these measures, how does your organization’s performance compare to that of your competitors and other organizations with…

Not Ready for Work…and What You Can Do about It

A 2006 report by The Conference Board found new entrants to the workforce unprepared for work.

A 2009 report shows that nothing has changed.

During the second quarter of 2008, The American Society for Training and Development, The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed 217 employers in manufacturing, financial services, non-financial services, education, government, and other nonprofits. The survey examined their training practices for newly-hired graduates from high school, two-year colleges, and four-year colleges.

You can read a summary of the resulting 2009 report here. The most disturbing findings include:

• More than 40% indicated a “high need” for programs in critical thinking
• Nearly 70% indicated a “high need” for programs to foster skills in creativity
• Significant gaps in training programs designed to increase awareness of ethics and social responsibility
• Sizable gaps in basic skills programs to improve reading comprehension, writing, and math

The report exposes the failures at all levels of our education system. Graduates suffer. Because older workers are postponing their retirements, “recent graduates with inadequate workforce skills will be at a disadvantage both during the recession and once the economy improves.”

Some companies are choosing not to hire graduates who are unprepared. For example, American Express screens applicants through a detailed hiring profile that eliminates the need for remedial training, which allows American Express to focus its training dollars on career development instead.

The report identifies several steps you can take to improve workforce readiness:

• Thoroughly screen applicants for their job readiness
• Provide readiness training within a culture committed to training
• Form…