Baldrige.com » strategic objectives

Aligning Individual Performance with Your Mission and Vision

Steve George — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:10:55 +0000

In most organizations, the mission and vision have little to do with what gets done day-to-day. Even if employees know what the mission and vision are—and very few do—they fail to see how their work contributes to achieving them. Instead, departments, teams, and individuals focus on different things, on what the boss tells them is important or the company decides to target that year or the latest problem needing to be fixed. Rather than pulling together toward shared goals, they are pulled apart by shifting priorities and diverging objectives.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients is how well they align people, plans, and processes with the mission and vision of the organization. Every department, team, and individual not only knows what the mission and vision are, but they also understand what they must do to support them. The connection between an employee’s work and the mission and vision of his/her organization is documented and measurable.

Poudre Valley Health System, which won the Baldrige Award in 2008, calls this its “Global Path to Success.” Like other Award recipients, it uses its strategic plan and balanced scorecard to cascade its vision, mission, values, and strategic objectives throughout the organization, as shown in its award application summary:

According to PVHS, the Global Path to Success “provides a leadership system and framework for this culture, incorporating: (1) the performance management system, which links individual goals to organizational goals through each employee’s personal goal card; and (2) the Code of Conduct, Behavior Standards, and Leadership Competencies, which outline specific behaviors that support organizational values, key customer requirements, and key workforce requirements. Members of the workforce understand and demonstrate the Vision, Mission, and Values and, through their goal cards, focus on how they can help the organization provide world-class care.”

You can measure the effectiveness of this approach at producing world-class care through the results PVHS has achieved:

One of seven U.S. hospitals named a Thomson 100 Top Hospital for superior outcomes, patient safety, and operational and financial performance—for five consecutive years
Recognized as the nation’s number one hospital for sustained nursing excellence in 2007 and 2008 by the American Nurses Association and the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators
Patient satisfaction scores that surpass the national top 10%, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services

You will find similar outstanding results in all Baldrige Award recipients because all have aligned their people, plans, and processes with their missions and visions.

To learn more about alignment, read:

10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning

Steve George — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:26:56 +0000

In previous articles we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization’s leadership and its 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 but want insight into how to improve strategic planning, here are 10 questions to ask and answer about your strategic planning process:

How do you conduct strategic planning including the key strategic planning process steps and participants in the process?
How do you identify potential blind spots during this process?
How do you ensure that strategic planning addresses: (a) your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); (b) potential major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; (c) long-term organizational sustainability; and (d) your ability to execute the strategic plan?
What are your current strategic objectives, the goals for each, and the timetable for achieving them?
How do these objectives address your strategic challenges and advantages, opportunities for innovation, core competencies, and the needs of all stakeholders?
How do you develop and deploy action plans to achieve your strategic objectives?
How do you ensure that financial, human, and other resources are available to support the accomplishment of your action plans?
How do you establish and deploy modified action plans as circumstances change?
What are your key human resource plans to accomplish your strategic objectives?
What measures do you use to track the achievement and effectiveness of your action plans?

To read the world-class responses of Baldrige Award recipients to these questions, click here and then click on the award application summary you wish to review.

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Why Organizations Fail

Steve George — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:06:40 +0000

In a 2004 speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Russell Ackoff told a story about an operations researcher at General Electric who was asked by the CEO to evaluate GE’s corporate objectives. He took a list of the company’s stated objectives, which sound like most organizations’ objectives, and compared them to corporate decisions for the last five years.

Every decision violated one or more of the stated objectives.

He then evaluated the decisions to see if he could figure out what objectives they served and he found that 92% of the decisions supported one objective: To maximize the wealth, security, and quality of life of the people who made the decisions.

If you think such behavior is limited to the business world, think again. Ackoff, who was a professor at Penn, was so bored at faculty meetings that he documented what they discussed for two years. The word “student” was mentioned once. According to Ackoff, “Teaching is the price the faculty must pay for the quality of life it wants.” He adds: “If you think this or any other university is dedicated to teaching students, you’re wrong. It’s about maximizing the quality of life of the faculty.”

Who does your organization serve?

To transform your organization, you must understand what the organization is pursuing, not what it says it’s pursuing, change those objectives, and design a new system to meet them. Ackoff quotes Peter Drucker, who said, “There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right things.”

If you do the wrong things right, you will still fail.

You can watch Ackoff’s 30-minute speech at the end of an article on the Huffington Post here.

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