All Posts Tagged With: "values"
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 | ContinuedEffective 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 with diverse employees. Highly effective companies train managers to communicate to a diverse audience.
The report also…
24Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Priorities of Leadership
“The more senior your management position is, the more important it is to connect the organization or the project to the outside world,” said Alan Mulally, president and chief executive officer of Ford. “How does this fit in with what we’re doing? What is the real goal, the real mission? And it makes you think about: What business are we in?”
The comments come from an interview for The New York Times, “Planes, Cars and Cathedrals,” published online on September 5, 2009. Throughout the interview, Mulally addressed the first questions asked in the first category of the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?
- How do senior leaders deploy your organization’s vision and values?
- How do senior leaders’ personal actions reflect a commitment to the organization’s values?
“I think the most important thing is coming to a shared view about what we’re trying to accomplish—whether you’re a nonprofit or a for-profit organization,” said Mulally. “What are we? What is our real purpose?”
High-performing organizations focus through a shared vision. Creating such a vision requires leaders who will listen to employees and customers and find the common themes and interests that everyone can support. “The higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that you can articulate,” Mulally said, “then the more it pulls everybody in.”
To make his point, he recounted one of his favorite stories. “This reporter stops by a construction site and he interviews three bricklayers. He asks the first bricklayer, ‘What are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’m making a…
16Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued25 “Moonshots for Management”
Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.
Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:
- “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
- The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
- We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.
The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:
- Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
- Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
- Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The Baldrige Criteria ask how “senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce” and how…
