All Posts Tagged With: "values"
Hire for Qualities, Teach Skills
Although 9% of Americans are unemployed, 52% of organizations recently surveyed by ManpowerGroup are having trouble filling positions. The problem is not that unemployed workers are living large off their unemployment benefits but that they lack the exact skills employers need.
At FastCompany, Donna Wells, CEO of Mindflash, suggests a solution that does not involve blaming our education system or the work ethic of our labor force: Hire for the qualities you seek and teach the skills they need.
Wells provides an example. Con-way Freight of Salt Lake City couldn’t find and hire qualified drivers fast enough to meet its needs. Rather than being chronically understaffed—and losing revenue as a result—it started free driving schools at 75 of its truck yards and guaranteed a job for anyone who passed the training. In the first 18 months, it graduated nearly 440 drivers and has retained 98% of them.
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that you can use to evaluate your hiring and training processes:
- What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
- How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
- How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new members of your workforce?
As Wells concludes, “With technology and industries shifting so quickly, our economy’s open positions aren’t necessarily a perfect fit for our unemployed workers. Rather than simply wishing that mismatch away, businesses need to embrace training to reduce it.”
To read more about building a…
21Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedContinuous Improvement and HR
If you have spent much time with senior leadership teams, you know the typical pecking order of those who report to the CEO. Finance on the right hand. Sales on the left. Operations, Marketing, IT, and Legal close by.
And then there’s Human Resources, which seems to have inherited a seat at the table. It performs essential services—recruiting, hiring, compensation, benefits—that every company needs, so it can justify its presence in the C-suite, but it rarely carries the influence that shapes strategy or drives performance excellence.
But it could.
Brad Power writes about this in “Why Doesn’t HR Lead Change?” He defers to Dave Ulrich, a University of Michigan professor recognized by HR Magazine as the most influential person in HR, who said there are three human resources processes that are critical to embedding a culture of continuous improvement:
Talent flow. Human Resources can develop processes for hiring and promoting that recognize the attitudes and behaviors their companies seek. Managers hire for expertise, not attitudes and behaviors, yet attitudes and behaviors that align with and support the culture and direction of the company are essential to continuous improvement. HR can make sure this dimension is considered.
Rewards. “Continuous improvement demands that people not only carry out their jobs, but improve their work too,” writes Power. I’ve never seen a more succinct explanation of why organizations need to integrate the Baldrige model. Tying rewards to continuous improvement is a problem for HR because “HR people typically don’t have the operational experience, expectation, or permission to engage line managers in…
17Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen Values Clash with the Bottom Line
The Baldrige Criteria ask: How do senior leaders’ actions reflect a commitment to the organization’s values?
For too many senior leaders, their organizations’ values are secondary to their organization’s financial performance. In those cases, the values are meaningless and the senior leaders who tout them are hypocrites.
A recent example is 3M. On its web site, 3M states that its values include “respect our social and physical environment around the world” and “earn the admiration of all those associated with 3M worldwide.” Since it only has six values, tarnishing two suggests that 3M’s senior leaders are not committed to their company’s values.
The tarnishing took place when 3M contributed $100,000 to MN Forward, a group that supported Republican Tom Emmer in last year’s race for governor of Minnesota. Emmer was staunchly anti-gay, opposed legislation to combat school bullying, introduced an amendment to eliminate Minnesota’s minimum wage when he was a state representative, and even sponsored a constitutional amendment to allow Minnesota voters to opt out of federal laws. Based on the gubernatorial election results, one could argue that at least half of Minnesotans opposed his positions. Yet 3M supported him.
Asked why at today’s annual meeting, CEO George Buckley said that 3M doesn’t take social issues into account when deciding which candidates to support and that it backed Emmer because of his pro-business stance.
So there you go: 3M’s values are secondary to its financial performance.
And its senior leaders’ actions fail to reflect a commitment to 3M’s values.
To read more about corporate social responsibility, click…
10May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow to Hire for Values
One of the first questions asked by the Baldrige Criteria is for the distinctive characteristics of your organizational culture. The entire Leadership category revolves around culture including how you set and deploy your vision and values, create your culture, promote legal and ethical behavior, and fulfill your societal responsibilities.
Culture is critical because it reflects “the principles that define who you are as an organization and that shape day-to-day business decisions,” according to Alan Lewis, owner and chairman of Grand Circle Travel, a $600 million tour business for Americans ages 50 and over. Lewis recognizes that an organization’s culture is carried by its people. “Employees who do not adhere to a shared corporate culture dilute it,” he writes, “detracting from the essence that gives your company its identity and helps it achieve aggressive goal.”
His views explain his January 26 article in HBR: “Why My Company Hires for Culture First, Skills Second.” Grand Circle Travel uses a values-based hiring model to interview potential job candidates for values. Lewis states, “This decision has not only enhanced our recruiting efforts, it has contributed to the long-term success of our associates and of our organization.”
He offers three pieces of advice for developing a values-based hiring process:
- Involve job candidates in activities that reveal their values. Grand Circle uses a group interview with quirky challenges that require them to interact, work with each other, solve problems, and exhibit leadership. He describes a “raw-egg drop exercise” in which job candidates working in teams must design a travel vessel for the…
The Baldrige Formula for Success
If you’re looking for a repeatable formula for success, integrate the Baldrige model. The fact that it’s been repeated by dozens of organizations of all types, each with impressive results, affirms that the management model defined by the Baldrige Criteria is a formula for success.
Bain & Co. decided that integrating Baldrige was too obvious, so it spent ten years studying more than 2,000 companies to find the formula for success. Jill Jusko lists the five principles Bain came up with in “A Repeatable Formula for Success” (IndustryWeek, March 16, 2010):
1. Know what the core of your organization is and how you’ve made it work for you. This may include four to seven assets such as brand and talent. In Baldrige terms, it means identifying your core competencies and building on them.
2. Have up to ten non-negotiable principles upon which your organization is built. Baldrige calls these your mission, vision, and values.
3. Prefer distributed leadership, which means fewer layers of management. Baldrige doesn’t prescribe distributed leadership, but it does promote empowerment and agility, which are often associated with fewer layers of management.
4. Keep information coming in from customers through a strong, closed feedback loop system. The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions about how you build a customer culture and how you listen to customers.
5. Keep the number of key operating measures small and be sure everyone at levels understands and believes in them. Again, Baldrige doesn’t tell you to keep the number of key measures small, but it does ask how you…
17Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAligning Individual Performance with Your Mission and Vision
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…
23Dec2009 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedStrategic Planning Definitions
On his Church of the Customer blog, Ben McConnell defined common strategic planning terms that often confuse people. I’ve sprinkled in the Baldrige definitions of related terms to provide a guide to the language of strategic planning, with CoC for Ben’s definition and BC for a definition from the Baldrige Criteria.
Mission. The overall function of an organization. It answers the question, “What are we attempting to accomplish?” (BC)
Vision. The desired future state of your organization—where it’s headed, what it intends to be, or how it wishes to be perceived in the future. (BC)
Values. The guiding principles and behaviors that embody how your organization and its people are expected to operate. (BC)
Core Competencies. Your organization’s areas of greatest expertise, those strategically important capabilities that are central to fulfilling your mission or provide an advantage in your marketplace. (BC)
Strategic Challenges. Those pressures that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)
Strategic Advantages. Those marketplace benefits that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)
Objective. A high-level achievement, like “improve customer loyalty” or “grow market share.” Objectives sit at the top of the strategic plan, and an ideal plan has no more than a handful of them. (CoC) The Baldrige Criteria refer to these as strategic objectives.
Goal. Anything that’s measured such as revenue, customer satisfaction, productivity, and quality. Goals determine how you fulfill an objective, and multiple goals support a single objective. (CoC)
Strategy. A way to describe a series of tactics or very specific actions…
14Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
