All Posts Tagged With: "mission"
Aligning with Strategies & Measures
The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (VACSP Center) won the Baldrige Award in 2009. It has four key strategic goals and 13 key performance indicators, which are listed on its balanced scorecard
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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 many organizations, Monfort uses a color-coded stoplight system to show progress on key performance indicators. Slide 11 places the 20 KPIs and the supporting performance indicators on the process framework to show how performance measures…
5Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners (Part 2)
In the first article in this series, I described two of the seven characteristics of organizations with sound management systems: (1) they think process and (2) they act on data. By winning the Baldrige Award, organizations demonstrate the effectiveness of their management systems through world-class results, a sampling of which you will find in the links at the end of this article.
Here, then, are the next three characteristics of these role-model organizations:
3. They know where they’re going. Yeah, I know, you’ve got a vision and a mission. Do you measure progress on them? Great companies know that what they’re doing today takes them further along the path to what they wish to become, and they don’t know it intuitively, they know it measurably. Today’s actions meet objectives that support strategies that realize the vision.
This interlinked structure is the product of careful research, thoughtful analyses, and ambitious goals. Dozens of people—sometimes hundreds of people—participate in the process of discovering what their company is, where it must go, how it can get there, and what will obstruct its progress. They repeat this process annually. When they’re done, they know individually and collectively where they are going. Even better, they know what they must do—individually and collectively, today and tomorrow—to get there.
4. They align activities. At most companies, if you strapped every employee into a harness and told them to pull, you wouldn’t get very far. Some would sit down…
27Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Drives You?
Daniel Pink wrote a book about what motivates us to do what we do called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. I have the book in my hand but I haven’t read it yet, but this video has inspired me to dig into it.
It turns out that study after study has shown that money works if you want people to perform simple, rudimentary tasks, but if you want them to do something more complex, you need the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
To learn more, watch the video — and then join me in reading the book.
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6Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHeartland Health’s Grand Unifying System
As a student of the Baldrige model, I am always attracted to a diagram, a “grand unifying system,” that shows how an organization aligns and integrates everything it does with its vision and mission. The latest example of such a diagram is Heartland Health’s Organizational Architecture (HH OA), which is shown below.
Heartland Health received the Baldrige Award in 2009. You can read its entire award application summary here. It is based in St. Joseph, Missouri, and employs more than 3,200 caregivers. Heartland Health is ranked in the top 15% of hospitals nationally for patient safety and is a leader in patient satisfaction. Using Six Sigma methods, it has saved more than $25 million as a result of process improvements.
The HH OA shows how many of the key elements in the Baldrige model work together to help Heartland Health achieve its vision and mission. Information from the Voice of the Customer (Category 3 in the Baldrige Criteria) feeds the strategic planning process (Category 2), as do strategic business assessments based on performance results (Category 7) and senior leadership reviews (“Manage and Improve,” Category 1). The strategic plan is deployed through the management model, which is aligned with the first six categories of the Baldrige model. The Process Model identifies Heartland Health’s key work processes (Category 6), each of which has a Process Scorecard for each service and product line and Performance Scorecard that feed the organization’s…
10May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSeeking Authentic Leaders
Bill George (no relation), former CEO of Medtronic, likes to talk about “authentic leaders” who focus on customers rather than hierarchical leaders who serve short-term shareholders. In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, “The New 21st Century Leaders” (April 30, 2010), George writes about four critical tasks today’s leaders must perform, all of which are addressed and supported by the Baldrige model:
Aligning. The highest-performing Baldrige organizations excel and alignment and integration. They have found that their missions and visions can only be achieved if everyone is moving toward them. Baldrige Award winners typically use their strategic plans to define this direction and the deployment of those plans and of balanced scorecards to make sure everyone is working on what is most important to the organization.
Empowering. Things are moving too fast to wait for marching orders from your supervisor, who must wait for her manager, who must wait for his director, who must wait for her vice president, who must wait for the president. Baldrige Award winners empower their people to make decisions by training, directing, and recognizing them and by holding them accountable.
Collaborating. We can’t do it alone, and that’s true of individuals or departments or business units or entire organizations. Baldrige Award winners blur the lines between themselves and their customers, suppliers, competitors, and communities, focusing on cooperation and the common good.
As Bill George concludes, “Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders…
3May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Baldrige Formula for Success
If you’re looking for a repeatable formula for success, integrate the Baldrige model. The fact that it’s been repeated by dozens of organizations of all types, each with impressive results, affirms that the management model defined by the Baldrige Criteria is a formula for success.
Bain & Co. decided that integrating Baldrige was too obvious, so it spent ten years studying more than 2,000 companies to find the formula for success. Jill Jusko lists the five principles Bain came up with in “A Repeatable Formula for Success” (IndustryWeek, March 16, 2010):
1. Know what the core of your organization is and how you’ve made it work for you. This may include four to seven assets such as brand and talent. In Baldrige terms, it means identifying your core competencies and building on them.
2. Have up to ten non-negotiable principles upon which your organization is built. Baldrige calls these your mission, vision, and values.
3. Prefer distributed leadership, which means fewer layers of management. Baldrige doesn’t prescribe distributed leadership, but it does promote empowerment and agility, which are often associated with fewer layers of management.
4. Keep information coming in from customers through a strong, closed feedback loop system. The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions about how you build a customer culture and how you listen to customers.
5. Keep the number of key operating measures small and be sure everyone at levels understands and believes in them. Again, Baldrige doesn’t tell…
17Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
