Advice for the Country’s First CPO

In June 2009, President Obama made Jeff Zients the country’s first chief performance officer with a mandate to make the government run smarter and cost less. Considering that the federal government employs two million people, and that most citizens would not put “smarter” and “cost less” in the same sentence with “federal government,” he’s got some work to do.

In “Obama’s efficiency expert” (Fortune, Jia Lynn Yang, December 29, 2009), Zients observed, “What President Obama has done with the chief performance officer title is say, ‘Management matters.’” In recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, he said, “The test of a performance management system is whether it is used…the current approach fails this test.”

I think the test of a performance management system is how effective it is. Whether it is used is a test of leadership, which also happens to be when management matters.

I have some advice for CPO Zients: Instruct every department and agency of the federal government to integrate the Baldrige model. Demand annual Baldrige assessments. Implement strategic and action planning processes to address the opportunities for improvement. Track and post every unit’s scores. By the time Obama leaves office in seven years, you will have institutionalized the best performance management system available throughout the federal government.

To make your job easier, the Baldrige program is run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology—a federal agency! And the Baldrige program is open to all government…

Reinventing Education with Baldrige

In the United States, one-third of eighth graders are proficient in reading. One-third of high school students do not graduate on time. One-third of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.

Is it any surprise that one-third of K-12 teachers approve of how their schools are run?

The figures come from a study of school performance by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. The fact that these three organizations can write a report together when they rarely agree on anything suggests that this is not just a right-wing or left-wing issue.

The study evaluated state performance in eight categories: school management; finance; staffing—hiring and evaluation; staffing—removing ineffective teachers; data; pipeline to postsecondary; technology; and state reform environment. You can see how your state did here. You can read about the methodology behind the grades here.

The report offers a blunt assessment: “Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives…And while the challenges are many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more effective ways.”

The report’s sponsors “propose a framework for change intended to address the structural problems facing our nation’s education systems.” Someone should have…

Making Performance Excellence Personal

The power of the Baldrige model lies in its ability to align people and processes with the mission, vision, strategies, goals, and action plans of the organization. Such alignment is a distinguishing characteristic of Baldrige Award recipients and a major reason they achieve world-class results.

The Baldrige Criteria ask about processes that support alignment in all six process Categories. One such process is your performance management system, the goal of which is to support high-performance work, engaged employees, a focus on customers/patients/students, and achieving your action plans.

In a white paper available from Oriel, Martin A. Preizler, John B. Martin, Ph.D., and Jim Christensen call this “sharing responsibility for quality.” They propose a Personal Performance Excellence Framework^TM to align personal quality and organizational quality. The framework is modeled after the Baldrige framework and includes questions for each area in the diagram below.

The personal framework translates many Baldrige Criteria questions to an individual’s perspective. For example, under the “Personal Profile” box, it asks:

• What are your core competencies?
• How does your work contribute to and support the organization’s mission, vision, and culture?
• What are your key challenges?
• How do you define, track, and measure your success?

For organizations that are struggling with alignment, especially engaging employees in sharing responsibility for improving performance and achieving goals, the questions posed by the Personal Performance Excellence Framework provide an excellent starting point for creating an effective performance management system.

You can download a free copy of the white…