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 and direction of senior leaders do not align with or support the organization’s mission and vision.
• Senior leaders are not personally involved in guiding their organization to performance excellence.
• Senior leaders are narrowly focused on financial performance to the detriment of focusing the organization on customers, learning, performance improvement, and excellence.
• Senior leaders guard information about direction, decisions, and performance and fail to routinely communicate with employees.

To read more about how senior leaders lead, click on these articles:

• What Great Organizations Achieve
• Leadership Matters Most
• 30 Principles of Effective Leadership
• Servant Leadership Boosts Employee Engagement
• Baldrige.com on Culture
• Leading Also Means Managing
• Communication Tips for Leaders

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:

1. Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
2. 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.
3. Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
4. 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.
5. 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.”
6. 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.
7. Build a common language. Be careful to avoid jargon that your team understands but that other parts of the organization—and critical stakeholders—may not.
8. Link innovation to your brand strategy. “Develop a brand-audit tool and use it early in your process. This will guide decision-making and only allow initiatives that meet certain brand criteria to be approved for further development.”

To read more about innovation and communication, click on these articles:

• Managing for Innovation
• Revolutionary Thinking
• When Innovation and Planning Collide
• 10 Healthcare Innovations
• What People Need to Hear
• Be Prepared
• Effective Employee Communication

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 system?
• How do you innovate your work processes?
• How are work process improvements and lessons learned shared with other units and processes to drive innovation?

To read more about innovation, click on these articles:

• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• Creating a Unique Customer Experience
• Revolutionary Thinking
• The Top Innovative Companies
• A Healthcare Innovator
• 10 Healthcare Innovations

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 share refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization?

Every organization, business unit, work unit, division, department, team, and individual can improve performance by asking and answering these questions about everything they do. The answers will reveal opportunities for improvement that can help you build a world-class management system.

To learn more about using Baldrige to improve your organization, read:

• Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization?
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
• 10 Tips for Answering Criteria Questions
• Applying for the 2010 Baldrige Award

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 core value exemplified by the learning—and teaching—of the Award recipients. You can learn from them by reading their award application summaries, available online here.

To find out more about organizational learning and benchmarking, read:

• Learn from the Best: Application Summaries
• KEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
• 10 Steps to World Class

• 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 the organization operates. Continuous improvement is part of every process, innovation is common, and breakthrough approaches set the organization apart.

You become a learning organization by making everyone responsible for learning, giving them the tools and responsibility to learn and to apply their knowledge, setting aggressive goals that demand continuous and breakthrough improvement, communicating improvements throughout the organization, and recognizing and rewarding success. Learning fuels improvement, and continuous improvement drives growth and long-term sustainability.

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:

1. 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;
2. 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.
3. Promote curiosity. No organization can change if it is content with the way things are. Learning organizations challenge the status quo. They seek a better way. And they recognize and reward people at all levels of the organization who take responsibility for improving performance.
   ♦To learn more, read Climbing the Corporate Lattice and Employee Development and 10,000 Hours of Practice.
4. Demand process thinking. All work is process. You cannot prolong your journey to world-class by constantly putting out fires or blaming employees for systemic problems. Ask how you do what you do, identify the steps, and manage and improve the process.
   ♦To learn more, read 10 Critical Questions: Process Management, Identifying Key Work Processes, 5 Powerful Process Questions, and Process Management: Work System Design.
5. Compare with the best. You need context to know if what you are doing is the best course and what you are achieving is truly world-class. Benchmark key processes and key results with those of high-performing organizations. Hold your organization to the highest standards and implement plans that will help you join them.
   ♦To learn more, read Outside-the-Box Benchmarking, Health System Benchmarks, and Comparative Data for Manufacturers,
6. Assess and apply. The only way to keep attention focused on improving your management system is to assess and improve it using the Baldrige Criteria. Many Baldrige Award recipients submitted applications for state awards and/or the Baldrige Award annually for several years before winning the Award—and many continue to do assessments after they won. Start with a self-assessment or by applying for a state award. Use the feedback to prioritize and address your biggest gaps. Repeat the process annually and you will improve.
   ♦To learn more, read Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization?, 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment, and New to Baldrige?
7. Drive continuous improvement. Use data and information to identify opportunities for improvement and have action planning and problem solving processes in place to address them. Build refinement steps into every process to make sure the process is systematically improved.
   ♦To learn more, read Blessed with OFIs and 10 Critical Questions: Process Management.
8. Align and integrate. Use your strategic planning and performance measurement systems to align what you do with what you want to achieve. Harmonize plans, processes, information, resource decisions, actions, results, and analyses to support your organization’s goals.
   ♦To learn more, read Alignment and Integration and Know Thyself—and Act Accordingly.
9. Innovate. High-performing organizations are good at everything and great at a few things. To be good at everything you need a culture of innovation that touches all processes. To be great at a few things, you need formal approaches to developing breakthrough approaches in those areas critical to your success.
   ♦To learn more, read 3 Systematic Innovation Processes and Making Innovation Part of Your Culture.
10. Sustain the gains. The first nine steps are a lot of work if you’re going to slack off as soon as you get to the top. To sustain the journey, identify the factors that must be in place and managed to remain world-class and then develop and implement processes to address them.
    ♦To learn more, read 4 Parts of True Sustainability, Identifying Capabilities Your Organization Needs, and Planning for the Longer-Term.

High-performing organizations have integrated Baldrige by integrating these ten steps into the way they operate. Their success is available to any organization committed to being the best.