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 competent and engaged workforce, click on these articles:

• Strategic Human Resources
• Best-in-Class Workforce Planning
• How to Hire for Values
• Evaluating Training Effectiveness
• Why HR Needs Baldrige

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 changing rewards to encourage operational improvement.”

Training and Development. Your learning and development system tells people what is important at your company. If it does not provide the knowledge and skills people need to improve their work, the message is that continuous improvement is not important. HR rarely pushes for improvement training unless it is driven by senior leadership.

According to Power, to lead change, HR must: (1) “use its power and influence to help leaders focus on customers, long-term business results, and building capabilities in their people—not a personal or HR agenda”; (2) be a partner, not just support; and, (3) get operational experience so they “know which knife, fork, or spoon to use when they’re at the table.”

To read more about the role HR can play in continuous improvement, click on these articles:

• Strategic Human Resources
• How to Hire for Values
• MEDRAD: Win with Your People
• Best Practice People Management

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 on these articles:

• Corporate Social Responsibility in 2010
• 4 Parts of True Sustainability
• How to Build a Culture of Social Responsibility
• Purpose-Inspired Growth

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:

1. 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 egg using only straws and tape, develop a marketing presentation to sell the egg’s “trip,” and then drop the egg from ten feet.
2. Be crystal clear about your culture and values. “Prospective associates will walk away on their own if they don’t believe they can fit in with your culture.” And that’s a good thing.
3. Keep values interviews separate from skills interviews. If you combine them, the values part of the equation may get lost. Lewis talks about a young superstar who had no relevant job experience—not skills to speak of—when he came to the group interview but who “demonstrated such ambition and leadership that we jumped to hire him.”

The Workforce Focus category of the Baldrige Criteria asks how you recruit, hire, place, and retain new members of your workforce. Grand Circle Travel, with 43% of its employees having worked five or more years with the company, demonstrates that hiring for values is a sound approach.

To read more about building an excellent workplace, click on these articles:

• How Does Your Workplace Measure Up?
• Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
• Best Practice People Management
• Engage Employees to Improve Performance
• Why HR Needs Baldrige

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 select, align, and integrate your key measures for tracking daily operations, reviewing performance, and tracking progress on your strategic plan. The Criteria also ask how you make data and information available and accessible.

To see what I mean about the success of Baldrige organizations being repeatable, check out these results:

• Financial Results
• Customer Results
• Workforce Results
• Quality Results

To read more about the Baldrige formula for success, click on these articles:

• 10 Questions to Ask about Everything You Do
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Leading the Integration of Baldrige
• 5 Added Values of the Baldrige Process
• Experts Tell You What to Fix
• 10 Steps to World Class

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:

• An Achievable Mission and Vision
• Alignment and Integration
• The Priorities of Leadership
• KEYSTONE: Mission and Vision

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 performed by a team or group of people. Each strategy description begins with a verb such as create, hire, develop, and launch. (CoC)

Tactic. A very specific action like creating a new program or improving an existing one. Each tactic has an owner responsible for making it work and its own action plan.

Action Plan. Specific actions that respond to short- and longer-term objectives and strategies. An action plan includes details of resource commitments and time horizons for accomplishment. (BC)

Alignment. Consistency of plans, processes, information, resource decisions, actions, results, and analyses to support your organization’s goals.

To find out more about strategic planning, read:

• 10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
• KEYSTONE: Mission and Vision
• Alignment and Integration
• KEYSTONE: Core Competencies
• Planning for the Longer-Term
• The 90-Day Action Plan