• Have a mass briefing at least once a month. High-performing organizations hold what are commonly referred to as “all-hands meetings” to discuss performance on plans and key scorecard measures, changes or trends in markets, and internal issues and successes. As Waldman notes, “your wingmen need to hear important news—whether good or bad—from you first.”
• Conduct feedback sessions. Meet regularly with the people who report to you to discuss how they are doing, what obstacles they are facing, and what they need from you. In high-performing organizations, this is a critical part of their performance management systems.
• Walk the flight line. “Spend time with [your people] on the job and observe how they do business. Ask questions. Show them your appreciation by connecting with them as people first and employees second.”
• De-brief your missions. One of the features of Baldrige organizations is how they “close the loop” on every process. When a process or cycle is completed, gather those with a stake in the process and discuss whether objectives were met and how the process can be improved. Continuous improvement is an attribute of a high-performing organization.

Waldman’s “wingtips” address questions in the Leadership category of the Baldrige Criteria, which asks:

• How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce?
• How do senior leaders encourage two-way communication throughout the organization?
• How do senior leaders communicate key decisions?
• How do senior leaders reinforce high performance and a customer and business focus?

You can read Waldman’s “wingtips” at “A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Effective Communication,” HBR, October 26, 2010. To read more about communication, click on these articles:

• Leading Also Means Managing
• What Great Organizations Achieve
• Leadership Matters Most
• Management’s Five Deadly Diseases
• A Leader’s Job

The report shows a diagram of the measurement system and the balanced scorecard used by the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center.

It presents the five-step measurement process used by Heartland Health and shows how it aligns its key measures.

The report includes the City of Coral Spring’s performance management system and talks about the performance agreements the city uses to align the strategic plan with its measurement system.

It lists the criteria MidwayUSA uses to select comparative data.

It describes the types of analysis that Cargill Corn Million performs and how its leadership team sets priorities for improvement.

It shows a diagram of the organizational performance reviews conducted by Premier.

It lists the criteria Iredell-Statesville Schools uses to select its key performance indicators and the process senior leaders use to review performance.

You can also learn about the common elements these award-winning organizations share and how you can use them to create an effective approach for your organization.

Sign up for your free report today and you will automatically receive free copies of the first two reports in this series on performance management and process management.

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Only in this case, they’re not children: They are the chairmen of 722 nonprofit hospitals, and 99% of them think their hospitals fare at least as well as a typical hospital on standard quality measures, according to a survey published in Health Affairs. Even worse, 100% of the chairmen of hospitals that perform the worst think they are at least as good as a typical hospital. (“Only 1% of Hospitals Are Below Average,” Jacob Goldstein, WSJ Blogs, November 9, 2009)

It’s hard to know what’s most appalling about this ignorance:

• The chairmen don’t know how their hospitals perform on standard quality measures, information that is available to anyone on the Internet.

• The chairmen don’t know what “typical” performance is—also available on the Internet.

• No one has bothered to share this information with the people who bear some responsibility for their hospitals’ performance or, worse yet—

• The chairmen don’t care.

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you evaluate the performance of your board members. I would add questions about how the board reviews the hospital’s quality performance to that evaluation. The Criteria also ask how you use these performance reviews to develop and improve the board. Based on the survey, one easy way to improve your board is to tell it how your hospital performs on standard quality measures. While you’re at it, share data on patient and employee satisfaction and process improvements along with that heavy dose of financials.

Then the next time this survey is taken, hospital board chairmen may have a clue what they are talking about.

To read more about hospital performance, click on these articles:

• To Improve Hospital Care, Improve the Board
• Measuring Quality in Healthcare
• 3 Ingredients to Improving Healthcare
• A Healthcare Role Model
• Baldrige Saves Lives
• Why Baldrige? Saint Luke’s Makes the Case

Each of the district’s 17 strategic goals is assigned an owner who is responsible for a district improvement plan that addresses the goal. Action plans that support the improvement plan are then developed within the owner’s department.

The owner reports on progress on the plan quarterly to senior leadership using the key measures listed in the table below and a rubric aligned to the factors by which Baldrige evaluates a process: approach, deployment, learning, and integration.

I-SS has more than 100 leading indicators for monitoring performance on short-term action plans that it tracks monthly. According to the application, “Each action plan is integrated with a PDSA approach, so that each plan must have three evaluation measures that measure completion and fidelity to the overall approach of the PDSA and an evaluation measure that impacts the overall goal.”

To see how all of this helps I-SS achieve its strategic goals, read its Baldrige Award-winning application summary (pdf).

The successors are listed in the company’s Talent Portfolio, a binder containing the names of P&G’s leaders compared to one another over six years on financial performance and the ability to lead and help others lead. Approximately 120 of P&G’s 135,000 employees reach general manager status and become part of the Talent Portfolio. They are evaluated every six months by their bosses, lateral managers who have worked with them, and their direct reports on a GM Performance Scorecard, which has one page of financial measures and another page assessing leadership and team-building abilities. There are at least three possible candidates for each major job, including CEO.

Although this formal process has been in place since 2001, P&G’s emphasis on hiring and retaining the right people can be traced to 1947 when CEO Richard “Red” Deupree said, “If you leave us our buildings and our brands but take away our people, the company will fail.”

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you accomplish effective succession planning for management and leadership positions. P&G has an effective, systematic response. The Criteria also ask how senior leaders create a sustainable organization. P&G’s Talent Portfolio, and its culture of valuing people, should sustain the company for years to come.

To learn more about sustainability and succession planning, read:

• 10 Critical Questions: Your Workforce
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• 4 Parts of True Sustainability

The 90-day action plan is a systematic tool for deploying a strategic plan. Before it came along, organizations often had trouble reviewing performance to plan during the year with the result that initiatives were not completed and goals were not met.

Organizations use the 90-day action plan to break annual goals and objectives into the quarterly actions necessary to achieve them. By reviewing performance on the 90-day plans, senior leaders ensure that actions are on track or they can more quickly intervene to get them on track.

Baptist Hospital, Inc., which received the Baldrige Award in 2003, was one of the first to popularize 90-day action plans. Its award application summary describes the process:

Leader annual goals…are translated into 90-day action plans to facilitate goal accomplishment. 90-day action plans for BHI leaders are formulated or updated each quarter. This process for updating or reevaluating action plans on a quarterly basis enables the organization to be flexible and agile in accomplishing or reassessing longer-term goals and objectives. The 90-day action plan process is the fundamental and fully deployed method used to evaluate progress toward accomplishment of goals and address other strategic issues. Senior officers also maintain 90-day action plans, which are called senior management priorities. At quarterly retreats, the senior officers evaluate progress toward accomplishment of their own goals and formulate changes as appropriate.

The Baptist Leadership Group has identified the following benefits of the 90-day action plan:

• “Harnesses” the energy of the organization
• Focuses the organization’s resources on well-thought-out activities
• Aligns departmental activities with the overall goals of the organization
• Forces upward communication and negotiation
• Forces clarity of expectations
• Reduces work by establishing agreed-upon objectives

In the Strategic Planning Category, the Baldrige Criteria ask how “you develop and deploy action plans throughout the organization.” The 90-day action plan has proven to be a good response to that question.

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