All Posts Tagged With: "senior leadership"
Effective Employee Communication
“Effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance and a driver of employee engagement,” according to the 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study Report by Watson Wyatt. “Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47% higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.”
The Baldrige Criteria ask four questions specifically about communication:
- How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce?
- How do senior leaders encourage frank, two-way communication throughout the organization?
- How do senior leaders communicate key decisions?
- How do you foster an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication?
An organization that can answer these questions with effective processes can claim effective employee communication, which, as the Wyatt study shows, improves employee engagement and financial performance. Representatives of 328 organizations in more than 25 industries worldwide participated in the study.
The report offers five steps your organization can take to become an effective communicator:
- Re-communicate your employee value proposition. Be clear about what employees can expect from your company and what the company expects from them.
- Talk about the new deal now. Educate employees about your company’s values and culture.
- Help employees appreciate what they have today. Make sure employees understand the value of their compensation and benefits programs.
- Trust and train your leaders to talk about change. Leaders and managers need to know how to lead and communicate with integrity during times of change—which is pretty much all the time.
- Learn how to communicate effectively…
Excessive Executive Compensation Derails Excellence
I’m certainly no expert on executive compensation, but I believe there are two reasons that paying executives exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and stock options is bad for business. The first is ethical. The second is cultural.
An article online at the Wall Street Journal today stated that “pensions for top executives rose an average of 19% in 2008, with more than 200 executives seeing pensions increase more than 50%.” Yet, as Ellen E. Schultz and Tom McGinty write in “Pensions for Executives on Rise,” “Executive pensions rose even as the share prices at the companies declined an average of 37% in 2008 and many firms froze employee pensions and suspended retirement-plan contributions.” And cut employee benefits. And laid people off.
That’s an ethical issue. It’s a moral issue. The Economic Policy Institute stated that the average CEO of a company with at least $1 billion in annual revenue makes 262 times what the average worker makes. I’ve heard all the rationalizations for this but they miss the point: Companies pay their CEOs these outrageous amounts because they have passive investors and servile directors who rarely question the conventional wisdom of paying a leader 262 times more than other employees. Very few have the courage to break this paradigm.
In “Ripping up the rules of management” (CNNMoney), Susanna Hamner and Tom McNichol compare the conventional “wisdom” to the best practices of companies such as Whole Foods, which limits executive pay to 19 times the…
4Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSocial Responsibility and Global Climate Change
Yesterday I posted an article about the triple bottom line, one focus of which is environmental. Climate Counts has developed a methodology to help measure a company’s commitment to fighting global warming, which is a key part of any organization’s social responsibility. In fact, one Baldrige Criteria question asks specifically about it: “How do you consider the well-being of environmental, social, and economic systems to which your organization does or may contribute?”
Climate Counts uses a 100-point scale and 22 criteria (pdf) to determine if companies have measured their climate footprint, reduced their impact on global warming, supported (or suggest intent to block) progressive climate legislation, and publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively. The scores determine if a company is stuck (0-12 points), starting (13-49 points), or striding (50 points or higher).
Not all sectors are covered, nor are all companies in a sector, but each sector is worth reviewing. For example, in the “Home and Office Furniture” sector, the following companies were ranked with their current scores:
- Steelcase 53
- Herman Miller 46
- Masco 39
- La-Z-Boy 16
- Sealy 16
- Leggett and Platt, Inc. 15
- HNI Corp. 13
- Fortune Brands 4
- Simmons 4
- Tempur-Pedic 1
- Select Comfort 1
- Serta 1
- Furniture Brands International 0
- Spring Air 0
You can download the full scorecard or a pocket guide to carry with you. As Climate Count notes, “Business has the power to change the world—and you have the power to change business.”
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2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Baldrige Right for Your Organization?
Absolutely.
It doesn’t matter what you do or how big or small you are, integrating the Baldrige model will make you a better organization. I’ve worked on Baldrige with medical centers, a K-12 school, a college and a university, a Wing Command of the National Guard and an Army base, a district court, a large market research company and a small one, a pharmaceutical company, medical device manufacturers and a computer manufacturer, a transport refrigeration manufacturer, a dental products manufacturer and dental insurers, printed circuit board manufacturers and a power supply manufacturer, and a gas and electric utility. Baldrige helped all of them improve performance.
But.
These organizations wanted to improve. Your organization may not. Baldrige is definitely right for your organization if you can answer these questions “yes”:
- Do senior leaders believe change is necessary?
- Will they support transforming your management system?
- Are senior leaders (preferably the senior leader) promoting Baldrige?
- Is your organization committed to performance excellence?
If you answer “no” to any of these questions, you can still conduct a Baldrige assessment and apply for the Baldrige and state awards and act on the opportunities to improve that are identified, but change will be slow and it will be hard to sustain. In the end, senior leadership must embrace Baldrige as a systematic, long-term approach to improving performance or you’re just diverting resources to a short-term program.
As Deming and Juran stated, 85-95% of an organization’s problems are caused by the system,…
2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership
In a previous post, we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization that will illuminate key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment now, here are 10 more critical questions, this time about senior leadership, which can help you uncover opportunities for improving your leadership system.
- How do senior leaders set and deploy your organization’s vision and values?
- How do their personal actions reflect their commitment to these values?
- How do senior leaders personally promote legal and ethical behavior?
- How do they create a sustainable organization?
- How do they create an environment for performance improvement and leadership, accomplishing your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, organizational agility, and organizational and workforce learning?
- How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce, including two-way communication and communicating key decisions?
- How do senior leaders create a focus on action to accomplish your organization’s objectives, improve performance, and attain your vision?
- What performance measures do they regularly review to identify needed actions?
- How do you evaluate the performance of senior leaders?
- How do they use their performance reviews to further their development, improve their personal leadership effectiveness, and improve the performance of the leadership system?
If you want to…
29Sep2009 | Steve George | 3 comments | ContinuedWhat Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?
It’s one of the first questions in the Baldrige Criteria. Few organizations have a good answer.
The Baldrige Criteria define core competencies as “your organization’s areas of greatest expertise…strategically important capabilities…central to your mission or provide an advantage,” that are frequently “challenging for competitors to imitate and provide a sustainable competitive advantage.”
What do you do better than your competitors that gives you an edge in your market?
Here’s an example from Richland College (RLC), the first and only community college to receive the Baldrige Award. Located in Dallas, Texas, RLC serves a multicultural student body of 14,500 students seeking college credits and another 6,000 continuing education students.
RLC has identified four core competencies:
- Seamless transitions for lifelong learning
- Leader-full, values-inspired agility and innovation
- Development and engagement of faculty and staff
- Sustainable community building – the triple bottom line
You will see evidence of processes RLC uses to take advantage of these core competencies in its award application summary and results that affirm that these are, indeed, RLC’s areas of expertise. Case in point: All employees have career-development plans that, for those employees encouraged to pursue senior leadership positions, include training, internships, and filling in for senior leaders when they are out. As a result, 22 former RLC employees have been named presidents at other colleges.
That’s an astounding statistic and strong evidence that developing faculty and staff is an RLC core competency.
You can read more about the need to nail down your organization’s core competencies at KEYSTONE: Core…
2Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedExternal Scan: Climate Change
“Companies need to think about how a changing climate affects things such as heating and cooling needs, water availability, and emergency preparedness for catastrophic weather,” write Marshall Chase and Ryan Schuchard of BSR, a global corporate responsibility consultant, for GreenBiz.com. That single statement speaks to several areas in the Baldrige Criteria:
- 1.1a3: How senior leaders create a sustainable organization
- 1.2c1: How you consider the well-being of environmental systems to which your organization does or may contribute
- 2.1a1: How your strategic planning process identifies potential blind spots
- 2.1a2: How strategic planning addresses early indications of shifts in technology, markets, products, and customer preferences
- 2.1a2: How strategic planning addresses long-term organizational sustainability
- 6.1c: How you ensure work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies including prevention and continuity of operations
Chase and Schuchard touch on several areas that climate change will—indeed, already is—affecting, including:
- Engaging your organization’s entire value chain in identifying and addressing risks and opportunities
- Focusing on your supply chain, which often has a carbon footprint equal to or greater than that of your organization. “BSR has worked closely with food-processing companies and retailers whose supply chain emissions are more than three times larger than those represented by their own facilities and purchased energy.”
- Considering the impact when customers use your products. Automobiles are the obvious example, but other companies, such as Levi Strauss and Co., are encouraging consumers to be more energy efficient.
- Monitoring changes both in the climate and related regulation that may…
