Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Applying for the Baldrige Award in order to receive feedback from trained examiners is just one way that some organizations use the Criteria for Performance Excellence. A much more common use of the Criteria relates to how an organization conducts its strategic planning and budgeting processes (category 2 of the Criteria). An example is the Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada (GFOA), which in 2014 awarded the Village of Pinehurst, North Carolina, with its Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for the seventh consecutive year and for the first time with its Special Performance Measures Recognition. (The nonprofit GFAO is a professional association serving over 17,800 federal, state/provincial, and local finance officials throughout North America who are involved in planning, financing, and implementing governmental operations. Its mission is to enhance and promote the professional management of governmental financial resources by identifying, developing, and advancing fiscal strategies, policies, and practices for the public benefit.) To achieve the Special Performance Measures Recognition, a government financial department must receive a score of "outstanding" from three independent GFAO reviewers following specific criteria for unit goals and objectives. "This year was significant," according to a news report in the Pilot.com, "as it marked the year the Village implemented a new strategic planning methodology based on the Baldrige Criteria. Specifically, the Village adopted a balanced scorecard to improve the organization’s performance measurement and performance management. . . . These awards represent a significant achievement by the Village. [They] reflect the commitment of the Village Council and staff to meeting the highest principles of governmental budgeting." The Baldrige-based methodology implemented to receive the budget award had to adhere to nationally recognized guidelines designed to assess how well an entity’s budget serves as a policy document, a financial plan, an operations guide, and a communications device. In addition, the GFAO’s website highlights the need for organizations to follow "Tactical Financial Management" and features Baldrige Award recipient the City of Coral Springs as one of the "best resources" for business planning, "an integral part of [any organization's] management model." "A business plan translates the governing board’s strategic plan into the staff level actions and accountabilities needed to implement the strategies. A business plan makes it much easier to translate a strategic plan into a budget. When the translation is more precise, it will be easier to identify and remove spending from the budget that is not aligned with the strategic plan. Also, elected officials with more confidence that the budget is aligned with their priorities will be more supportive of the integrity of the spending plan throughout the year," according to the GFAO. In alignment with this GFAO definition, the Baldrige Criteria, without prescriptively telling an organization how it should conduct its strategic planning and budgeting, provide thoughtful considerations for developing and implementing a strategic plan, including considerations for innovation, work systems and core competencies, strategic objectives, action plan deployment and implementation, resource allocation, and performance measures and projections. How does your organization’s strategic planning and budgeting align with the GFAO and Baldrige Criteria?

Posted by Christine Schaefer How is a company to decide whether to use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001: 2008 Quality Management System (QMS), or both? To explore some key distinctions between the comprehensive business model provided by the Baldrige framework and the quality management system provided by ISO, I recently talked to someone who has used both in his work. He also has taught and presented on the value of each and the relationship between them. Ron Schulingkamp, ScD, MQM, MBA, has taught business leaders and MBA students alike about the Baldrige Criteria. As the senior strategic consultant for DM Petroleum Operations Company for more than a decade, Schulingkamp helped senior leaders transform the company into a high-performing organization that earned the Baldrige Award in 2005. As a visiting assistant professor in the College of Business of Loyola University in New Orleans, Schulingkamp has taught graduate business students how to use the Baldrige Criteria—which he describes as a "holistic, systems-based, high-performance business model"—to assess the performance of organizations, including local government organizations and companies where his students are employed.  Ron Schulingkamp Schulingkamp also has conducted quality audits in the petro-chemical industry using ISO standards. He keeps abreast of revisions to both the Baldrige framework (updated every two years) and the ISO 9001: QMS standard (last issued in 2008, with a revision coming out in 2015). The body of ISO 9000 standards includes ISO 9001: Quality Management System (QMS), which focuses on product and service quality for the customer. Schulingkamp noted recently that the ISO 9001: QMS is a systems approach based on systems thinking about management and that it encompasses all the processes and interconnections between the supplier and the customer. He also noted, however, that it doesn’t address the rest of the organization (e.g., health and safety, risk, financial, innovation, and environment—although there are separate ISO standards for those areas). He said he often recommends organizations start with the ISO 9001: QMS because "if properly implemented, it will provide the CEO and senior leadership team with a mental model for management based on an organizational system, not a functional silo." He added, "Often when senior leaders first read the [Baldrige Criteria], their response is, ‘Where does it tell me what to do?’ The concept of a nonprescriptive, interrelated, systems-based business model is contrary to teaching in most business schools." Why so? Schulingkamp explained, "The typical professor in business school is an expert in a very specific field of study. Business leaders usually have studied with brilliant professors in accounting, economics, marketing, management, statistics, etc. But it is rare for a business professor to be an expert on the interrelationship, alignment, and integration of business systems. In fact, few business schools teach ‘quality management’ beyond the level of an overview course."   To highlight differences between the Baldrige business model and the ISO 9001: QMS, Schulingkamp starts with a comparison of the Leadership category of the Baldrige Criteria and the Management Commitment clause of ISO:9001 QMS. He explained that senior leaders (in particular, the CEO), are responsible for developing management systems and creating value. "We know from ancient philosophers such as Aristotle to modern management gurus such as W.  Edwards Deming—plus hundreds of contemporary practitioners, researchers, and authors—that leadership is the key to improving organizational performance," said Schulingkamp. "Deming wrote and often spoke about the role of senior leadership and the importance of leaders’ understanding of systems thinking. For example, in his 1993 book The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education, he described his "System of Profound Knowledge," a powerful construct that consists of four important concepts: (1) an appreciation of a system, (2) understanding of variation, (3) psychology and (4) epistemology, or a theory of knowledge." As Schulingkamp sees it, the ISO 9001: QMS "provides the structure and prescription for senior leaders to begin the process of understanding the organization as it relates to the customer." Schulingkamp pointed out that, in comparison to the Baldrige framework, the more prescriptive nature of the ISO 9001: QMS is demonstrated in the "shall" statements of its requirements. "The Baldrige framework provides a holistic, systems-based business model that builds alignment across the organization by making connections between and reinforcing organizational systems, processes, strategy, and results," he noted. To underline one difference, Schulingkamp raised the question, "How does ISO help you with strategic planning?" He pointed out that the ISO QMS standard asks about quality plans, but not strategic plans. In contrast, the Baldrige Criteria ask about strategy development and strategy implementation, which encompass systematic approaches for developing strategic objectives and action plans, implementing them, changing them as needed, and measuring progress. ISO also doesn’t ask about development of your workforce or leaders, Schulingkamp added. "If you fully implement the ISO 9001 QMS, you may be getting at less than half of what Baldrige asks about," he said. Illustrating the point, he described his experience in conducting ISO audits for petro-chemical companies; in particular, when he asked about customer complaints, businesses asked him what that has to do with ISO. "Although ISO requires the measurement of the quality management system processes and analyzes conformity to customer requirements and customer satisfaction, it is not unusual for an organization to focus on the customer requirements and miss the opportunity to manage the customer relationship," he said. In contrast, the Baldrige Criteria in effect ask for the organization to have a holistic approach to building long-term customer relationships, which is part of a customer relationship management system. Specifically, the Baldrige Criteria ask "how your organization engages its customers for long-term marketplace success, including how your organization listens to the voice of the customer, builds customer relationships, and uses customer information to improve and to identify opportunities for innovation." Another difference from the Baldrige framework, according to Schulingkamp, is that ISO does not specifically address learning or integration. "ISO addresses continual improvement as it relates to the QMS, which may infer learning, but is not really learning," he said. In contrast, he pointed out that the Baldrige Criteria address learning by asking about new knowledge or skills acquired through evaluation, study, experience, and innovation. The Baldrige Criteria also refer to two distinct kinds of learning: organizational and personal, he added. "The Criteria refer to organizational learning as learning achieved through research and development, evaluation and improvement cycles, ideas and input from the workforce and stakeholders, the sharing of best practices, and benchmarking; the Criteria refer to personal learning as learning achieved through education, training, and developmental opportunities that further individual growth."   Based on such differences, Schulingkamp values ISO as a "first step" toward a systems perspective and toward stimulating systems thinking by a senior leadership team. He sees in the tiered bands of the Baldrige scoring system a way to view the relationship between ISO 9001: QMS and the Baldrige Criteria; in this context, Schulingkamp sees use of QMS as a beginning approach in the lower bands. "The value of ISO [QMS] is that it teaches you about organizational systems, which is helpful to understanding Baldrige," he said. To depict the complementary way a business can use both the Baldrige Criteria and ISO standards to ensure product quality and overall performance excellence, Schulingkamp suggested this analogy: "the Baldrige framework is like the blueprint of a building, with ISO used for specific systems within the building such as electrical and air conditioning systems."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Being "the purest Baldrige colony on the planet" is #15 of 32 in the culture statement that  2009 Baldrige Award recipient MidwayUSA uses to define itself. According to founder and CEO Larry Potterfield, the statement spells out how employees should treat each other, how employees serve Stakeholders, and how Midway runs its business. The components are aligned with the values of its Customers, so naturally employees are aligned as well. The first 11 components are the core values of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence; said Potterfield, "We want a culture that lives with, drives on the core values of Baldrige." MidwayUSA CEO and FounderLarry Potterfield I recently asked Potterfield about the organization’s approach to Baldrige continuous improvement and how it lives up to its vision "to be the best-run, most-respected business in America for the benefit of our Customers." How has MidwayUSA changed since 2009 and how has it stayed engaged with the Baldrige Criteria? "The growth of the company continues at unprecedented rates," said Potterfield. The organization’s ability to respond to and deliver value for Customers continues to improve all the time. In addition, MidwayUSA, an internet retailer of shooting, hunting, and outdoor products, continues to have an "unprecedented approach to and interest in Baldrige," said Potterfield. "I’ve not found an organization with the enthusiasm or bench strength that Midway has in Baldrige." In fact, Baldrige examiner training is part of leadership development and a professional credential for up-and-coming managers. Five MidwayUSA managers have served as examiners for the Baldrige Program and 40 as examiners for the Baldrige-based Missouri Quality Award. "The very finest thing that has ever happened to me as a business administrator," said Potterfield (adding that he has a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s of science degree in management), "the very greatest education and the very greatest benefit that I have ever been able to find in terms of becoming an administrator has come through the Business Criteria, from applying it in what I call this laboratory MidwayUSA. . . . This is a phenomenal organization in terms of its performance and focus on Customers. It’s a role model for Missouri. It’s a role model for the nation. And it’s all because someone took the time to put the Baldrige Criteria together and keep it current all these years." Potterfield added that MidwayUSA calls the Baldrige Criteria a "collection of leadership and management principles. This is how you should manage your organization. Use the Criteria book. . . . Business administration is simply what Baldrige is." To give back to the community and improve public education in Missouri, in 2013, Larry and his wife Brenda donated $1 million to the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for the first K-12 school district in the state to win a Baldrige Award. "Where do you get a million dollars to give away? It comes from success in the business. That success—huge, huge amounts of it—come from Baldrige." Speaking of that success, as the CEO, for what are you most proud? Potterfield said he is happiest talking about employee satisfaction, for which MidwayUSA’s goal is 86%; the small business is currently at 88%—the highest percentage yet recorded. When MidwayUSA received the Baldrige Award in 2009, employee satisfaction was at 82%, and Potterfield admits that he didn’t really understand how to get it any higher. In 2009, Midway’s approach to satisfaction included an annual survey and a focus group led by a middle manager. Today, MidwayUSA conducts semi-annual employee surveys, with focus groups led by the president of the company. Each focus group stays very specific, focusing on the lowest-scoring items, with the goal to address changes to processes and/or policies that would improve employee satisfaction in the particular department on the particular item. Potterfield said this has been a "game-winning approach," especially considering that half of the employees are hourly. MidwayUSA has continued to benchmark other Baldrige Award winners and today even teaches employee satisfaction through lunch-and-learn sessions with other Missouri companies. Those sessions are part of a local Columbia, MO, support group that Potterfield conceived in 2008 called America Needs Baldrige!: Baldrige Performance Excellence Group (BPEG). Since the first meeting in March 2010, 11 meetings typically have been held each year on Baldrige-related topics. Presenters are always a MidwayUSA vice president, the president, or the CEO, with presentations/white papers shared. Midway even shares instructions of how to create a Baldrige support group (BPEG) in your own community. Baldrige asks for an organization’s mission, vision, values, and purpose. What is the importance of these for MidwayUSA? Potterfield said that the small business has had a mission statement for the last 20 years, but it’s the vision statement that’s truly powerful—and can be recited by just about every employee. "All of the things that we do here are based on that simple, little vision," Potterfield said. "I can’t imagine a more powerful vision. If there’s a stronger vision statement in America, then I’d love to see it." Potterfield said that when the small business first got involved with the Baldrige Criteria, it struggled to articulate its values. Over the years, the organization has learned that it’s human beings (not organizations) who have values, so MidwayUSA adopted "the nine most important human values: the non-negotiable family principles that guide us." Nobody gets in the door, or stays, if they don’t have these nine values. "You want a culture of trust," Potterfield said, "if everybody shares these values, you have a much greater possibility of having a trusting organization than any other words that you could put down on a piece of paper." What are you working on next regarding Baldrige? Last year, Potterfield worked to get a bill introduced in Missouri that would give a tax break to qualified state small businesses that win a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Although the bill didn’t initially pass, Potterfield is more confident that it will this fall. From the state of Missouri, such a bill might be picked up by other Baldrige community members, Potterfield said, and driven in other states and then nationally. "I wish we could get Baldrige deployed to America," Potterfield added.

Posted by Christine Schaefer   The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program has long relied on a wide network of experts to help us inform organizations in every sector about how the Baldrige framework can help them boost their performance for the long term. Organizations that have used the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to improve and excel, particularly Baldrige Award recipients—as well as the large corps of current and past Baldrige examiners who have conducted organizational assessments using the Criteria—often speak to national and international organizations with whom they work or within their local communities about the Baldrige Criteria and related offerings. To support such presentations, the Baldrige Program annually revises and makes freely available a set of educational resources about the Criteria for Performance Excellence and the Baldrige Program. Whether you are planning a presentation—or are just interested in learning more about the Baldrige framework and the national program behind it—consider downloading one or more of the nine PowerPoint presentations posted on the Baldrige Ambassadors web page. The 2014 files include the following: ·         The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: Describes the purposes of the award and benefits of applying for it, outlines the eligibility categories and conditions for applying for the Baldrige Award, provides general schedule information and steps in the annual award process, describes the role of Baldrige examiners, provides historical scoring data from the Baldrige Award process, and lists award recipients to date in each sector ·         Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence: Comprehensively examines the foundational framework and core values of the Baldrige Criteria and each category; also provides testimonials from senior leaders of organizations using the Criteria in the business/nonprofit sector Sample Slide from "Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence" presentation ·         Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence: Same as above, focused on Education Criteria with testimonials from education organizations ·         Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence: Same as above, focused on Health Care Criteria with testimonials from health care organizations ·         Introduction to the Baldrige Criteria: Introduces the basic purposes and evolution of the Criteria for Performance Excellence, provides a primer on the framework (e.g., describing the systems perspective and core values and concepts), and outlines how to start using the Criteria and related offerings of the Baldrige Program ·         Performance Excellence: A Systems Approach and Tools: Details how the Baldrige Criteria can be used effectively as an umbrella or systemic model for organizational performance excellence, complementing such tools and approaches as Six Sigma, Lean, and ISO 9001 ·         Baldrige Program Impacts: Provides recent data on beneficial impacts of the Baldrige Criteria and national program, particularly in the health care sector, and describes factors in this success, including the network of Baldrige-based programs that are part of the Alliance for Performance Excellence. Also profiles and highlights results of the most recent (2013) Baldrige Award winners ·         Introduction to the Baldrige Program: Summarizes the history, accomplishments, and offerings of the Baldrige Program for organizations to get started on a Baldrige journey ·         Self-Assessing Your Organization with the Baldrige Criteria: Outlines uses of the Baldrige Criteria and related resources offered by the Baldrige Program for organizational self-assessments These sets of slides can be customized for use in presentations before organizations of any size and sector. We hope you’ll share how you’ve spread the word about Baldrige for the benefit of organizations in your industry, community, or professional sphere of influence.

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon I have found myself in numerous conversations lately about continuous improvement and innovation. Is there a difference between the two concepts? Is the distinction important? While the lines between improvement and innovation might blur, I think there are conceptual differences that are important and worth understanding. Innovation is about breakthrough change or discontinuous improvement. Improvement, as generally referenced, is about continuous improvement, doing the same thing better, faster, cheaper with less waste. Innovation is about disrupting the existing process or product and conceiving or re-conceiving from the start. Improvement is about higher levels of performance; innovation is about new dimensions of performance. Improvement processes generally yield positive results. Innovation processes might result in success. Innovation involves risk-taking. Innovation decisions are generally strategic, aligned with organizational planning.  Innovation attempts will sometimes result in failure. That potential should be recognized at the outset and lack of success should be rewarded for the attempt, not punished for the failure. In most organizations, improvement activities are locally chartered, might require some managerial approval, but rarely require senior leadership involvement. Innovation is more challenging. Senior leaders must set the supportive environment, encourage outside-the-box thinking, reward success and failure, participate in decisions about which intelligent risks to pursue, and make the resources  (people, time, and funding) available to support innovation projects. Henry Ford Health System (HFHS), a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, considers innovation to be one of its core competencies. HFHS strives for innovations in four areas: clinical research and technology, facilities, services and access points, and processes. Innovations have included health kiosks in community faith-based organizations and demonstration kitchens in the hospital where patient’s families can learn healthy cooking. Cargill Kitchen Solutions (formerly Sunny Fresh Foods), a two-time Baldrige Award recipient, defines two types of innovation: customer focused innovation and high performance innovation. Customer focused innovations involve converting knowledge and insight into new customer products and services. High performance innovations involve converting knowledge and insight into new processes that help create distinctive value, competitive advantage, and profitable growth. HFHS sums it all up with two equations: ideas + execution = innovation, and innovation + accountability = sustainable growth. What is your organization doing to achieve sustainable growth?    

Posted by Christine Schaefer In a recent blog, "Emotional Hijacking: Why Logic Doesn’t Work with Angry Customers," Gallup Senior Strategist of Customer Experience and Innovation John Timmerman provides considerations that organizations can use both to prevent and manage customer complaints. Timmerman also shared with us the science behind his blog, noting "Customers experience ego depletion (inability to use rational judgment) because the amygdala (part of the brain that controls emotions) can freeze up the logical functions of the brain. This becomes more exacerbated because the amygdala is triggered by an aversion to loss such as a customer perceiving they are at the losing end of the equation. The perceived loss of not receiving fair treatment can trigger the amygdala which overrides rationale thinking and puts emotions in full control of behavioral response." Illuminating the futility of some responses to angry customers, Timmerman added, "The ego depletion increases as employees try to use rational responses when the customer is only tuned into an emotional channel. The fatigue of ego depletion becomes worse as the customer is handed off to other people and escalates into a full emotional hijacking." For organizations to avoid such situations, Timmerman’s blog lays out "six rules to prevent emotional hijacking." Such insights complement information that the Baldrige Program makes available on national role-model organizations that have developed strong customer-focused processes—and thus reaped beneficial results in the areas of customer satisfaction and engagement (item 7.2 of the Baldrige Criteria). For example, 2010 Baldrige Award recipient K&N Management (profile linked as PDF file) has achieved results in its restaurants that demonstrate that it has long recognized the importance of building strong customer relationships. The Texas-based small business has systematic processes for serving customers’ needs to engage them and build relationships (item 3.2 in the Baldrige Criteria). Those processes include both preventative practices and immediate and effective management of complaints if and when a customer has indicated dissatisfaction. As the organization stated in its 2010 Baldrige Award application (publicly available on the Baldrige website), "The food service industry demands fast resolution to guest dissatisfaction." K&N Management described its process for managing complaints in part as follows, "Most of our complaints are submitted while the guest is still in the store, thus we have implemented a process to quickly handle and satisfy guest complaints when submitted at the store level. Verbal in-store comments and complaints are largely handled by [team members] and managers who are trained and empowered to delight the guest through hospitality and quality control. In-house complaints are processed initially by [team members] by replacing product that does not satisfy the guest." K&N’s approach to managing complaints appears to align with scientific insights conveyed by Timmerman. To wit, its restaurant employees "are fully trained on guest delight during training and are coached to personally take ownership of any guest complaint and resolve it based on verbal and non-verbal cues from the guest." K&N’s complaint management system is depicted below.   Graphic used with permission in this blog.                 "Our goal is not just to resolve the complaint and make whatever is wrong right, but to go a step further and create a delighted guest by turning a negative into a positive," said K&N Management Co-Owner Ken Schiller recently. "Doing this builds relationships and creates long-term raving fans. Our team members know we will recognize and reward their actions in achieving this result and they will never be reprimanded for doing too much to delight a guest." How do people in your organization address angry customers? Do you have a systematic approach for building customer relationships that creates "long-term raving fans"?

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In a recent Baldrige Foundation survey, some respondents noted that "non-award-based organizational assessments" were a product that they wished the Baldrige Program would offer. However, such a program is currently offered, and it is called the Baldrige Collaborative Assessment. Following are some of the most common questions-with answers—about this organizational assessment. Why does your organization need this? Organizations receive actionable, timely, customized feedback on their strengths and opportunities for improvement through the lens of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, a proven framework for organizational improvement. The assessment, conducted by trained Baldrige examiners, offers an opportunity for organizations to get a fresh, outside perspective on their key processes and results to help guide them to the next level of performance. The examiners sent to perform the assessment are among the Baldrige Program’s most experienced, senior-level examiners, and the program does its best to match up their backgrounds with the type of organization being assessed. In addition, organizations can even customize the assessment to ask the examiners to focus on particular areas of their operations needing the greatest focus. Why do you need this? The examiners conduct the organizational assessment in a collaborative fashion, offering real-time feedback, followed by a written report. You will have the opportunity to ask questions about the findings, including questions about potential blind spots or vulnerabilities that the examiners find. You will receive actionable feedback, supported by evidence, to discuss with your leadership team. The feedback includes suggested priority actions for where your resources might be most effectively used. For this organizational assessment, you don’t need to write a 50-page application, and there is no pressure on you or your workforce because the Baldrige Collaborative Assessment is not part of or connected to an award. How will it help you beat your competitors? As Baldrige examiners are experts in performance excellence, your organization will have the ability to work with them side-by-side to focus on your key priorities or challenges. This has led to key learnings for many organizations to answer the question, "What’s critical to our success?" To help answer that question, examiners use the Baldrige Criteria that highlights an organization’s core competencies—those strategically important capabilities that are central to fulfilling an organization’s mission or that provide an advantage in its market or service environment—as well as an organization’s strategic challenges, strategic advantages, and its entire system. This in-depth focus on your organization’s greatest areas for improvement will sharpen your competitive edge. Following the assessment, a detailed report is prepared and sent to your organization with recommendations along with additional information to assist your organization in taking action on the recommendations. How will this motivate your workforce? Because the examiner team comes to your organization, and there is no award pressure attached to the assessment, numerous staff members can get engaged in sharing, learning, and collaborating with the Baldrige examiners. The approach is conversational, which has the ability to energize workforce members who can be a part of the collaboration. What will you need to do? You will need to complete an Organizational Profile questionnaire to enable the  examiners to gain a better understanding of your organization’s operating environment, organizational relationships, and key strategic challenges and advantages. You will work with the examiner team leader to plan the assessment, including the scope, logistics, and other key documents that may be needed by the examiners. You will collaborate with the examiners during a 4-1/2-day site visit of your organization in which the examiners will collect data, analyze the data, and formulate feedback. At the conclusion of the site visit, you will gather your organization’s leaders to participate in a closing meeting at which the examiners present findings and high-priority recommendations. How do you get started? Contact the Baldrige Program at 301-975-2036 or baldrige@nist.gov.

No blog today;  just a wishing you a safe and happy 4th of July. Blogrige posts resume next Tuesday, July 8th.  See you then! US Flag at NIST

Posted by Christine Schaefer We sometimes hear of organizations adopting the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence in relatively limited ways to improve performance. They may start by just adopting core concepts and values behind the Baldrige framework. They may conduct a self-assessment with their employees in just a few categories of the Baldrige Criteria. They may be able to do these things, at least initially, in only one department. They may not yet have buy-in from their organization’s senior leadership. To share how others might scale use of the Baldrige Criteria to their situation, I recently interviewed two department leaders who started using the Baldrige framework just with the people who provide support services to the rest of their organization. The story they shared is one of a positive transformation in the workplace culture of the University of Kansas Medical Center. It began three years ago after eight administrative and operations departments started benefitting from foundational concepts and assessment questions in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. The boost in workforce engagement and related results—particularly in the quality of work provided by the support services to other departments—reportedly became apparent within the first year, creating a momentum for changes that continue to spread across the organization today. Choosing Baldrige Steffani Webb, vice chancellor for administration at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC)—who is also a new Baldrige Executive Fellow—had initially heard about the Baldrige Criteria in a graduate business class that had used a Baldrige case study to learn about organizational management. "The Baldrige framework seemed to me a very comprehensive but still simple approach linking together all the important aspects of management and leadership and operations," Webb said. Webb oversees central support-services departments that encompass human resources, information resources, public safety, parking, facilities, landscaping, finance, and compliance functions. These departments, she said, had tended to be viewed as "very bureaucratic, focused on tasks and policy and processes, regardless of how effective those were in meeting the needs of those they needed to serve." In deciding to adopt Baldrige "in a subset of the organization almost as a pilot," Webb said she figured "if it was successful there—even if we never took it wider in the organization—it would benefit the organization by making those functions better for people." Inspiration and Tools for the Journey In September 2011, Webb and two colleagues—including Tom Field, KUMC’s associate vice chancellor for organizational improvement—attended a Baldrige regional conference in Kansas City, Missouri. They learned about using the Baldrige Criteria in presentations by senior leaders of several high-performing organizations that had received the Baldrige Award. That same year, Field became a Baldrige examiner, and a colleague became a state-level examiner with the closest Alliance for Performance Excellence program. The examiner training and experience they each gained in using the Baldrige framework to evaluate organizations "really helped," said Field. According to Field, the KUMC group left the Baldrige regional conference with "inspiration and enthusiasm" about using the Baldrige framework in their organization. He noted that a helpful exercise at the conference used a relatively simple Criteria-based assessment tool provided by the Baldrige Program called Are We Making Progress? (AWMP). Within their organization, Webb, Field, and others initially used the AWMP self-assessment tool as a "to-do list." According to Webb, managers and leaders used the survey to identify areas to work on; they also have now used it more broadly throughout the organization to address gaps in performance. For example, they reallocated funding to support an internal communications position. "From my perspective, AWMP was a catalyst for everything we did," said Field. Today, KUMC is also using AWMP "as a key piece of our employee engagement survey," said Field. They are planning to send this year’s survey to all employees of the organization for the first time; the 2012 and 2013 surveys went only to support services employees, who constitute about 20% of the medical center’s overall workforce. According to Webb, the initial Baldrige-based assessment they conducted in the administrative departments focused on the workforce (category 5 of the Baldrige Criteria) in order to improve services. "We wanted to create a culture around engaging and empowering the workforce," she said. "Next we started to get more effective about instituting organizational values and goals." Drawing from the Leadership category of the Baldrige Criteria, they worked on "better conveying those values and goals in order to bridge the gap between ‘management’ and the workforce." Ongoing Training Using the university’s mascot, KUMC’s Baldrige journey has been named the "Jayhawk Way," and the related training program is known as "Leading the Jayhawk Way." Field conveyed the "big goals of the training" as follows: (1) to create an internal brand for the workforce—i.e., one promoting workforce members as "highly motivated people aligned to a shared vision of important work, to make this a place where you wouldn’t want to leave," (2) to create alignment in the organization (because "we had been very task-focused but not necessarily connected to the organization’s greater vision"), and (3) to "improve how we communicate with each other and create a culture of open, constructive communication." After two "waves" of training provided over the past two years, the voluntary program has now served 709 participants from KUMC, including 100 faculty members of the organization. Registrants include employees from a partner hospital, the parent organization, and two other medical center campuses, some of whom will be driving great distances to participate. What’s more, a partner business of KUMC has expressed interest in sending executives to a future session. The Impact Improvements that Webb, Field, and others at KUMC have seen so far have exceeded their expectations. "What happened was that changes in the levels of engagement and quality of work that people were doing caught the attention of people in other parts of the organization," said Webb. "I figured implementation would be slow, but the truth is that it has lit a fire." Webb and Field both cited the "culture of appreciation" that has developed as a significant change. For example, "the facilities and landscaping staff began to receive notes of thanks from other departments—it was never the case before that people acknowledged each other’s efforts," Webb said. She noted that traditionally some of those employees weren’t allowed much say in their work; "they were told what and how to do the work," but that now they are encouraged to speak up to suggest improvements to better serve customers. KU Facilities Group   How long did it take before improvements became apparent? According to Webb, some positive changes were evident almost immediately in the workforce after the launch of Baldrige efforts; one year later, "the organization was very different." She attributes the success so far of the improvement initiative to the early focus on people—the "ones at every level of the organization who know where the problems are." "It’s nice to see people who for most of their careers were way in the background who now understand the connection between what they’re doing and the more glamorous [work of the organization]," she said. Most administrative employees will never interact with a patient or a student served by the larger organization, she added, but "they now understand that none of that great work can happen without them." KU Landscaping Group   The Verdict "The [Baldrige] model is outstanding—even if you only use it in your own area, improving your part of the organization is good," said Webb. "In doing so, you demonstrate what’s possible. This is enabling the future growth of our organization." While Webb acknowledged "our organization still has a long way to go" in its journey to excellence, she stressed, "This has been so much easier than I ever thought it would be. As one employee said, ‘We moved a rock and started a landslide.’"

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Much has been discussed about the value of tomorrow’s leaders learning about the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence while still in school. As an example, I remember listening to a presentation by Bruce Kintz, president of Concordia Publishing House, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, about how he remembered that the Baldrige Criteria were part of his leadership training when he came to the struggling publish house; as a new president, he implemented the Baldrige Criteria and turned the organization’s future around. Over time, the Baldrige community has worked hard to plant the seeds of Baldrige in academia through dedicated professors with Baldrige examiner experience, presentations, participation at conferences (in fact, my colleague recently staffed a Baldrige booth at the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs conference), LinkedIn groups, and meetings with deans and professors, among other initiatives. But like anything today, more brand name awareness, more education, and more proof of outcomes are always needed. As students are one of the largest groups that contact the Baldrige Program’s customer service line, we recently developed a "Criteria 101″ document (found on the Baldrige website’s home page under Popular Links) that specifically answers their what, how, why, and where questions in simple language. We’ve also been reaching out to professors, as time allows, to ask how and why they teach the Criteria and what the Baldrige Program might provide to support them. We’ve learned that professors who teach the Criteria, most often use them as a management and/or self-assessment tool, often asking students to assess a Baldrige case study or their own organizations (either dreamed up or real) start with the Organizational Profile and then ask students to develop strategy and deployment, with objectives and metrics, until they can build an organizational system and understand its complexities and needs for alignment review Baldrige case studies (including scorebooks) from a variety of sectors, as well as actual Baldrige Award recipients’ application summaries and profiles practice the Baldrige approach-deployment-learning-integration (ADLI) and levels-trends-comparisons-integration (LeTCI) approaches, and then ask students to offer organizational improvement suggestions view Baldrige multimedia on YouTube and flickr use Baldrige self-assessment tools such as Are We Make Progress? and easyInsight: Take a First Step Toward a Baldrige Self-Assessment focus on the Criteria’s Core Values as the basis for an assessment project, requiring students to extract the relevant themes from the Core Value descriptions and use them as a basis for assessing their own organizations help students to realize a performance excellence initiative for their own organizations According to Ferris State University professor Dr. Anita Fagerman, a current examiner for Baldrige-based Michigan Performance Excellence, there is great value for students in learning about the Baldrige Criteria: "The Criteria are so important to assessing an organization to determine where you’re at and where you want to be. . . . [Use of the Baldrige Criteria] is all encompassing, cross-cutting. It keeps an eye on the money at the same time as addressing business concepts." She added that teaching the Organizational Profile yields some of the best insights from students. Dr. Britt Watwood, who teaches an  online interdisciplinary doctorate program on leadership at Creighton University and who is a former examiner and judge for the Baldrige-based Georgia Oglethorpe Award, said, "What always impressed me about Baldrige is not that it tells you how to do quality but asks you the right questions that drive the thinking that leaders need. Quality is just the lens that helps leaders become better. I can think of no better lens for leadership than Baldrige." He added, "I would continue to use the Criteria for leadership questions about quality . . . because the Criteria are well thought through, and the systemic approach is what really grabs the students’ attention." Dr. Jim Evans, a professor at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati and former Baldrige judge and examiner, has collected reflections from his masters’ of health administration students on learning about Baldrige: It is my personal goal to attempt to receive the Baldrige Award, whether as a CEO or merely as a person working for a company attempting to improve itself through the Baldrige process.  I anticipate that my in-depth training in the Baldrige process . . . will be a real asset to me and as well as my organization as we begin our own journey toward excellence. The last page of the "Criteria 101″ document contains information that deans and professors who may not have looked at the Criteria for years—even decades—may find of interest. In fact, these links were recently shared with a dean at the Yale School of Business who said he felt that his colleagues’ knowledge on Baldrige should be refreshed. So, please help in planting and sowing the seeds of Baldrige with tomorrow’s leaders. Feel free to share the "Criteria 101″ document with professors in higher education in your area, and we will keep sharing, too. And if you teach Baldrige or can share pearls of wisdom on how to encourage deans and other professors to take a second look at the Criteria, please share!