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…

Baldrige.com on Culture

With more than 400 articles, Baldrige.com has repeatedly addressed the critical elements of a world-class management system. One of those elements is your organizational culture. Click on the “links” below to read more about how to create and sustain a culture that supports your vision and mission.

Your culture dictates how your organization will behave (link). Disconnects such layoffs, excessive executive compensation, and environmental or safety violations are evidence of why so many organizations—and so many organizational cultures—fail (link).

USAA has developed one of the most successful cultures in the business world by treating its employees well (link), which then extends to exceptional treatment of its customers (link) (link). One of the ways organizations like USAA develops such compelling cultures is by creating a shared vision for what the company is and what it wants to become (link). Creating a shared vision is one of the most important jobs of senior leadership (link), as is the development of an achievable mission and vision (link)

Sustainability is a key characteristic of a robust culture. The goal is to build a sustainable organization that can survive change in whatever form it takes (link), which means addressing the four parts of true sustainability: social, economic, environmental, and cultural…

Start Aligning Now!

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award winners is the alignment they achieve of processes, individual performance, measurement systems, strategic plans, and results with the mission, vision, and goals of the organization. When everything and everyone is pulling in the same direction, an organization can produce and sustain performance excellence.

According to the Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado, organizations that decide to systematically improve their management systems can and should work on alignment right from the start. In a presentation at the twelfth Quest for Excellence this year, Monfort emphasized four dimensions that need to be aligned right away:

• Stakeholder needs and relationships
• Organization structures and systems to address those needs
• Performance measures to track performance and progress
• Strategic goals and objectives

You can view the slides in the presentation by visiting Monfort’s Web site here. The presentation is relevant to any type of organization because the concepts, like the Baldrige model, are applicable to all organizations.

The sixth slide in the PDF presentation shows how Montfort defined a student-centered process framework, identifying key stakeholders and their needs and relationships on one slide. The next two slides overlay Monfort’s management control system to show who is responsible for meeting these needs.

Like…