When visiting with senior leaders about the value of embarking on a Baldrige journey, a frequently used phrase is, “It’s not about the Award.”  At that point, the discussion moves to writing an application, and the sense of leaders is: “We’re applying for an Award!”  How do we convince leaders that there is value within the Baldrige process above and beyond applying for Baldrige or a state or local quality award?

Leaders need to understand what value the Baldrige process provides if it’s not just about the award, especially considering the investment of time involved in developing a 50-page application.

In my experience, five “added values” of the Baldrige process demonstrate the benefit of developing a Baldrige application—even if you never submit the application to an award process.

1. Accountability Tool. The structure of the Baldrige process forces accountability.  When senior leaders take responsibility for a particular Baldrige category, they “own” the linkage among the three components of the application:

• Organizational Profile: What is important to the organization?
• Process categories: Based on what is important, what do we do, and how do we do it?
• Results category: Now that we’ve done it, were we successful?

2. Sustainability Tool. The Baldrige process helps document how business is done at the organization.  The departure of a senior leader doesn’t have to mean we start all over again.  The application describes how the organization operates; a new senior leader is able to “hit the ground running” because processes are already in place to ensure sustainability over time.

3. Improvement Tool. While the application is being written, opportunities for improvement (OFIs) are already being identified, prioritized, and addressed.  This set of cross-cutting OFIs ensures a cross-functional approach to improvement.

4. Alignment Tool. The Baldrige process helps move the organization past the “silo” mentality that sub-optimizes performance.  Senior leaders can no longer view success in their functional area as sufficient; the Baldrige process requires a “systems view” of success.  CEOs, Boards of Directors, and other stakeholders will welcome this systems perspective as a key value of the process.

5. Recruitment Tool. The Baldrige application is a great tool for recruiting board members, senior leaders, and other key staff/stakeholders.  Sharing the 50-page application (or just the Organizational Profile) with a request to review the document helps them determine if this is an organization and an improvement culture in which they want to participate.

The Baldrige process allows leaders to view the organization as a synergistic whole.  Demonstrating the value of the Baldrige process is critical to helping leaders understand why they should invest resources in completing an application.

Paul Grizzell
Core Values Partners, Inc.
www.corevaluespartners.com

There’s no shortcut around this step. Sure, there are Baldrige surveys and abbreviated assessments you can do, but they do not provide feedback about all elements of your management system, nor do they give you an accurate picture of your entire management system. You need a full-blown assessment to effectively integrate the Baldrige model.

The ninth step in the assessment process is to act on the evaluation. The evaluation will have a number of opportunities for improvement (OFIs) across all categories of the Criteria and a few major OFIs that affect multiple areas. Start with these. As a senior leadership team, discuss the evaluation and the OFIs and prioritize them based on what you believe is most important for the short- and long-term success of the organization.

Next, figure out how you will tackle the top two or three OFIs. The reason it’s only two or three is that these opportunities are big, cross-functional gaps like redesigning the strategic planning process, developing a balanced scorecard, or implementing a formal approach to process management. If you don’t have a systematic process in place for acting on these opportunities, this is a good place to begin deploying Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA).

In my experience, at the start of their Baldrige journeys, very few organizations exhibit a process mentality, which is why they tend to score poorly on their initial assessments. Baldrige is a process model. Nearly all of the questions in Categories 1 through 6 focus on your processes. You can accelerate the integration of the Baldrige model by asking and answering these questions about everything you do:

• How effective is your approach?
• Is it repeatable and based on reliable data and information?
• Is it applied consistently and used by all appropriate work units?
• Is it refined through cycles of evaluation and improvement?
• Is it aligned with your organizational needs?
• Does it produce excellent results?

You can see what a process mentality looks like in the award application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients. Read any or all of Categories 1 through 6 in one of these summaries and you will be struck by the consistency of the organization’s approaches to process design, management, and improvement. That’s tangible evidence of integrating Baldrige.

You also integrate Baldrige by focusing on results. If you don’t have a balanced scorecard, set one up. Identify the key measures that will tell you how well your organization is doing and cascade them throughout the organization. As the Baldrige Criteria state, “A comprehensive set of measures or indicators tied to customer and organizational performance requirements provides a clear basis for aligning all processes with your organization’s goals.”

Alignment and integration are characteristics of a Baldrige organization.

Finally, turn the wheel. Do another assessment next year. Act on the OFIs. Consider applying for your state’s quality award or for the Baldrige Award. Act on the OFIs. Compare your processes and results to world-class benchmarks. Act on the OFIs. Turn the wheel.

Integrating Baldrige is about systematic, continuous improvement to achieve performance excellence. Baldrige Award recipients have proven the legitimacy of this approach.

And they all started in about the same place you are starting today.

1. Answering the Criteria questions will give you a new and deeper understanding of how your organization works—or doesn’t work.
2. Getting feedback from the Baldrige or state program will help you identify strengths you can build upon and opportunities for improvement.
3. Acting on what you learn during #1 and #2 will make you a better organization.

I described the application process in an earlier article. In this article, I want to discuss the feedback you receive when you submit an application.

First, a quick overview of what happens to a Baldrige application after you submit it. (State programs follow a similar process.) Trained examiners are assigned to evaluate and comment on the application. A team of examiners then reviews the application and observations by conference call to reach consensus on your strengths, opportunities for improvement, and scores. If the Panel of Judges does not select your organization for a site visit, one of the examiners on the consensus team produces your feedback report. If you do receive a site visit, the site visit team leader finalizes your feedback report after the judges decide who should receive the Award.

The feedback report begins by identifying the key themes both for the process Items, which are Categories 1 through 6, and the results Item, which is Category 7. It lists your most important strengths or outstanding practices and your most significant opportunities, concerns, vulnerabilities, and gaps.

The bulk of the report details your strengths and opportunities for improvement (OFIs) for each of the Criteria’s 18 Items. Applicants will tell you that the greatest benefit of applying for a Baldrige or state award is these OFIs. Cargill Corn Milling, which received the Baldrige Award last year, got 131 of them in its feedback report—and it won the Award! Getting a list of important areas to improve, agreed upon by consensus of trained examiners, offers priceless insight into the things you need to work on to achieve performance excellence.

If a high-performing company like Cargill Corn Milling can learn from the application process, imagine the value of the feedback to an organization that has more to learn, and more to gain.

You can find Baldrige Award application forms here. To learn more about a state award program, click here.

Start here:

What is Baldrige?

Baldrige refers to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which the U.S. Congress legislated in 1987. The first Baldrige Awards were presented in 1988.

Each year, applicants for the Baldrige Award prepare detailed assessments of their management systems. Their applications respond to the Criteria for Performance Excellence (click here to read the Criteria booklet), which have seven Categories that cover everything important in a management system:

1. Leadership
2. Strategic Planning
3. Customer Focus
4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5. Workforce Focus
6. Process Management
7. Results

Who uses it?

Any organization that wants to systematically improve its management system. You can find a complete list of Baldrige Award recipients here. It doesn’t matter what size your organization is or what it does, you can use the Baldrige model and process to improve.

How does it work?

Organizations assess their management systems using the Baldrige Criteria to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. They prioritize the opportunities for improvement and develop action plans to address the top priorities. A year later, most repeat the process. And the year after that and the year after that…

The application process is simple: Ask and answer all of the questions in the Criteria. The hard part is that many of the questions have probably never been asked before and you are unlikely to have high-quality answers for all of them. It also takes some time to research and write an application that responds to nearly 150 questions.

You don’t have to apply for a Baldrige Award to follow this process. Some organizations do internal assessments using the Criteria, hire one or more experts to evaluate them, and use the feedback to drive improvement. Others apply for state quality awards, which you can learn more about here. The pros and cons of each option are presented here.

How would we know if it can help our organization?

Easy: It will. I’ve worked with industry leaders and industry laggards and everything in between and the Baldrige process has helped them all. The tangible evidence of the value of integrating Baldrige is the results of Baldrige Award recipients. You will find a good summary of those results in their Profiles, which are online here. Scan the list for an organization you want to know more about and click on “profile” under the organization’s name. You can also see a list of financial results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients here and a list of their customer-related results here.

What’s it going to cost?

That depends on how you do the assessment. If you do it all internally, you can expect to spend 300 to 400 hours researching and writing an application/assessment. You may also choose to spend a few thousand dollars on an outside consultant to facilitate the process and/or provide initial feedback on your application. If you hire an outside person or group to do the research and writing, it could cost from $40,000 to $75,000 or more depending on the size and complexity of your organization.

Baldrige Award application fees for 2010 are $1,250 for education, nonprofit, K-12; $3,500 for other educational institutions, businesses, healthcare organizations, and nonprofit organizations with 500 or fewer staff/employees; and $7,000 for organizations with more than 500 employees. You can find complete award application guidelines here.

State award programs charge less. You can find out if there’s an award program in your state and how to contact it here.

How long is it going to take?

You can produce an application/assessment in three months—but I wouldn’t advise it. Give yourself at least six months for the first one. Subsequent applications will not take nearly as long.

As for how long it will take to integrate Baldrige, the answer depends on your organization. You can produce a world-class management system in three years. Five years is more common. For organizations hungry to remain on top, the journey never ends.

What good will it do?

If you produce just one application/assessment, you will come away with a powerful list of things to improve that will help you become a better organization. You can use the list to get consensus from senior leaders on priorities, develop action plans that address them, and allocate resources to support the improvement effort. Such lists tend to feature “big picture” opportunities like developing a performance measurement system/balanced scorecard, gaining a better understanding of customer requirements, improving employee engagement, deploying a systematic approach to process management and improvement, or reengineering strategic planning. Without a Baldrige assessment, these opportunities rarely appear on leadership’s radar, which means your organization will continue suffer ineffective and damaging approaches.

If you do annual Baldrige assessments and close the gaps they reveal, you will develop an outstanding management system that will give you a competitive advantage, enable you to provide world-class service to your customers, patients, students, or constituents, and move you toward the vision for your organization.

How do we win the Award?

Very few organizations win the Baldrige Award on their first try. In fact, most of the organizations I’ve worked with, including some industry leaders, scored in the 250 to 350 point range the first time out. Baldrige Award winners typically get around 700 points. So there’s a lot of work to do identifying and closing gaps.

You win the Award by having effective, systematic, well-deployed approaches to every area addressed by the Baldrige Criteria, by providing evidence of evaluation and improvement and organizational learning, and by reporting good-to-excellent results on most areas that are important to your organization. To see what this looks like, read the award application summary of a Baldrige Award recipient. You will find the summaries here. Scan the list for an organization you want to know more about and click on “award application summary” under the organization’s name.

How do we start?

Start by assembling enough information for senior leaders to make an informed decision. You should be able to do that with the explanations and links provided in this article and with other relevant articles and pages on Baldrige.com. Invite leaders of organizations that have won the Baldrige Award or been using the Baldrige model to speak to your leadership team. Ask senior leaders what else they need to know to make a decision. If your state has an award program, have one of its representatives meet with your leadership team.

The best use of the Baldrige model is to integrate it into the way you do business, and that will transform your organization. Senior leaders need to be on board with that.

If you do all this research only to be asked for a quick summary, try this: Baldrige is a proven approach for understanding how your management system works and where it needs to be improved to achieve performance excellence and world-class results.

And you’ll have the information you need to back up that statement.

If you still have questions, post them in a comment to this article and we’ll get answers for you.

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The plant manager for Cargill Corn Milling was asked how his organization prioritizes the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) it gets from the Baldrige feedback and from Cargill’s Business Excellence process. He noted that they got a total of 131 OFIs from the 2008 feedback reports. Their leadership group used a priority matrix to rank the OFIs based on their importance to Cargill Corn Milling’s mission, vision, and purpose. They then decided to work on the top three OFIs this year.

For people new to Baldrige, a couple of things may be surprising about this. First is the fact that a Baldrige Award recipient got 131 OFIs. What you have to remember is that recipients typically score in the 650 to 750 point range. The missing 250-350 points are OFIs. There are no “perfect” organizations.

The second surprise is that, out of 131 OFIs, the organization is working on just three. I think that’s misleading. In my experience, improving performance on those top three OFIs will lead to improvement on several others. For example, addressing an OFI that questions how systematically you improve your work processes will also address all of the OFIs in other Categories that raised that issue for individual processes. Besides, no organization has the resources to tackle 131 problems and still conduct their daily business.

As all of the speakers stated, the Baldrige process is not about the Baldrige Award: It’s about continuous improvement. And that’s why they welcome their OFIs.

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