Posted by Christine Schaefer In 2005, Richland College of Dallas, Texas, attained the distinction of being the first community college in the country to be named a Baldrige Award winner. Nearly a decade later, the institution, part of the Dallas County Community College District, continues to use the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to drive improvements, innovation, and excellence. Richland College students interact with an instructor. According to Fonda Vera, executive dean for planning, research, effectiveness, and development, Richland College today finds value in Baldrige "by supporting employees as examiners; by staying abreast of changes to the Criteria and incorporating those changes into how we work; and, most important, by continuing the discipline of our measurement systems (both overall and departmental)." In a presentation during the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference next month, Vera and her colleague Bao Huynh, director of institutional effectiveness, will discuss the college’s Criteria-based practices in relation to measuring its performance through a comprehensive system. They’ll address considerations such as how to choose the best measures, what those measures tell you about the organization’s performance, and next steps after selecting measures and tracking data for them. In the meantime, Vera shared the following information in response to our questions. What are a few reasons that education institutions can find value in investing in a Baldrige-based performance measurement system? The three greatest benefits that a Baldrige-based performance measurement system provides are focus, framework, and discipline. The Criteria can guide institutions through non-prescriptive questions to clearly define what is important or key to the organization. Once what is key is determined, that should help the organization make a myriad of other decisions especially in times of uncertainty. The performance measurement system creates a strategic framework that helps the organization decide where and how to innovate and to determine intelligent risks. The discipline of using data to avoid the tendency of relying upon opinion or whim helps institutions to make continuous meaningful progress towards their goals. What are your top tips for using Baldrige principles to support performance measurement and improvement? 1.       Design a system for measurement that is repeatable and sustainable (Approach). 2.      Involve all key groups in development and share the results widely (Deploy).  3.      Make calm, clear-headed decisions based on the data analysis and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of the process itself (Learn). 4.      Align the measurement system with the organization’s mission, vision, values, and key work processes (Integrate). What else might participants learn at your upcoming presentation? Participants will learn why it can be useful to regularly entertain the thought of failure. Building productive paranoia into a measurement system can help an organization to better prepare in good times and make calm, clear-headed decisions in bad times. For more information, attend the district’s presentation, "How to Create a Comprehensive Institutional Measurement System," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Monday, April 7.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In 1994, Rosabeth Kanter-Ernest L. Arbuckle professor, Harvard Business School, and chair and director, Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative-was an overseer for the Baldrige National Quality Program. Now, twenty years later, her leadership experiences have come full circle back to Baldrige, as she will be the Monday morning keynote speaker at the Quest for Excellence® Conference on April 7.  Her presentation is entitled Big Leadership—How to Ensure the Impact You Want. The role of the Baldrige Board of Overseers is to suggest improvements to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and function as an advisory committee for the Baldrige Program, reporting to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In Baldrige 20/20: An Executive’s Guide to the Criteria for Performance Excellence, Dr. Kanter wrote that since 1987 and the advent of the Baldrige Award "to encourage American companies to examine their practices, benchmark against the best companies, and make necessary changes to become leaner, faster, and more customer-oriented, with fact-based decisions and responsiveness to multiple stakeholders, all in pursuit of zero defects and high performance. . . . The Baldrige Program has itself evolved to add more variables that have become critical to effectiveness in an intensely competitive global information economy. There is a high premium for innovation, the faster the better, as well as the ability to continuously upgrade products and processes." In terms of how the global economy and the leadership needs of American organizations have changed today, she wrote, "This context makes the Baldrige Performance Criteria more necessary and appropriate than ever. Continuous improvement is not merely a good thing for a handful of companies but a survival strategy for every organization—the only way to create organizations capable of rapid adjustment to rising standards and changing conditions." Dr. Kanter, who specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change, has been repeatedly named to lists of the "50 most powerful women in the world" (Times of London) and the "50 most influential business thinkers in the world" (Thinkers 50). Through teaching, writing, and direct consultation to major corporations and governments, Kanter has guided leaders worldwide. She wrote, "[The] Baldrige Criteria can help organizations assess and improve their performance, becoming more sophisticated about how to align all of their processes to achieve desired results. That is important not only to the success of manufacturing and service enterprises but also sectors such as health care and education which are vital to the future of the economy and the well-being of society. . . . The Baldrige Award is given to only a few of the applicants because they meet the highest standards. But in a sense, every organization that uses the Baldrige Criteria for self-study and change can turn out to be a winner due to their increased ability to learn, adapt, innovate, and achieve excellence." Twenty years after serving as a Baldrige overseers, Dr. Kanter plans to illustrate for Quest for Excellence audience members how purpose-based companies and institutions organize for impact, as well as the leadership skills and sensibilities that help them achieve greatness. "The Baldrige quest for excellence is a valuable step on a journey toward high-impact goals that make a difference as an organization serves all of its stakeholders and society," Dr. Kanter said.

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon In just a few short weeks, at the Quest for Excellence conference, we will be graduating the third cohort and initiating the fourth cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows. Once again this year, it has been a great experience for the Fellows and those of us privileged to work with them. The Fellows Program is a year-long exposure to Baldrige for current and rising senior executives. During that year they are exposed to senior executives of Baldrige award-winning organizations, learn from each other, and work on a strategically significant capstone project that will benefit their organization or business. The current cohort met most recently in January at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, VA.  Aside from experiencing Ritz-Carlton hospitality firsthand, Fellows had the opportunity to interact with both Ritz-Carlton leadership and leaders from K&N Management, a small business Baldrige Award winner. Our topics at this meeting were customer and workforce focus. I thought I would share a few short sound bites from that meeting for you to ponder: "If I am listened to, I am engaged." "Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care." "From the outside it appears effortless, from the inside everything is intentional." "Don’t create leaders who are toothless tigers, a lot of roaring and no bite." These are good sound bites to challenge your own organizations and its leaders. Do you use these ideas as guidance in your own organization? They certainly reflect concepts within the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. What about having a stand-up 15-minute meeting on each of these statements and brainstorm how your organization does or should address each of them. If you want to hear more pearls of wisdom or meet some of the Baldrige Fellows, join us at the Quest for Excellence conference on April 6-9, 2014 in Baltimore. Your biggest challenge will be deciding which nuggets to pursue when you return home to your organization!

Posted by Christine Schaefer When Montgomery County Public Schools earned a Baldrige Award four years ago, it became the largest and most culturally diverse school district in the nation to have yet achieved the prestigious honor. Recently, staff members of the district shared how they continue to use processes based on the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to prepare students for future employment—including "jobs that do not exist today" but may be important tomorrow in a world of innovation and economic changes. Following are excerpts from a virtual interview with Rose Ann Schwartz, a staff development teacher, and Dr. LaVerne Kimball, an associate superintendent of the district. What are a few reasons that a school district can find value in implementing the Baldrige framework today? With limited resources, it is vital to work smarter, not harder. Resources must be aligned with goals.  Baldrige does this. For example, the framework helps us implement a strategic plan that integrates our key competency areas of academic excellence, creative problem solving, and social emotional learning. And we use our school improvement plan to drive what we do and how we allocate our resources. With this framework in place, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) maintains a focus on quality, rigor, and accountability. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) set the learning goals and define the knowledge and skills students should master to be college- and career-ready. By implementing the Baldrige Criteria, your school district is able to pinpoint organizational strengths and tools for implementing the curriculum, tracking outcomes, and identifying opportunities for improvement. How do you use Baldrige processes to support your district’s adoption of the CCSS? CCSS needs to be part of a comprehensive approach to support rigorous student learning, and the Baldrige Criteria serve as a comprehensive framework for performance excellence. The framework focuses on results and requires management by fact and helps an organization stay customer- and market-focused. CCSS supports the expectation that students take ownership of their own learning. So students should be able to defend and justify their responses through multiple solution paths; frame solutions in context; identify variables and interpret results; choose appropriate learning tools; identify structure for their task; identify most efficient solutions to a task; and make connections to prior knowledge. We use a collaborative planning process to ensure that we are implementing the curriculum across our system systematically. Here are our process steps, with questions we address at each one: 1.       Plan: What is the indicator or standard asking our students to do? What are the difficult points for teachers?  Students? What are the connections to prior/future learning? How will the thinking and academic skills be addressed? 2.      Do: What is acceptable evidence of proficiency with the indicator?What is the sequence of learning? How will we identify ways instruction can be adjusted to meet the needs of all learners? 3.      Study:  How will we know students are learning it? Review data points around multiple pathways. 4.      Act: What do we do if they already know it? What do we do if they do not learn it? Additional insights to share? The thinking and academic skills that we are helping students build in MCPS align with the CCSS emphasis on the development of critical skills; for instance, problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity are vital to students’ future success in college and workplaces. The skills we are building to prepare students for future work also include intellectual risk taking, collaboration, synthesis, persistence, analysis, evaluation, fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and metacognition. For more information, attend the district’s presentation, "Using Baldrige to Implement the Common Core," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.  

Posted by Christine Schaefer  Around this time last year, we highlighted on Blogrige how MESA doubled its revenue after winning its first Baldrige Award in 2006. The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based small business also more than doubled in size between 2006 and 2012, when it won its second Baldrige Award. As it transformed from a manufacturer to a full-service provider of corrosion control and integrity solutions to the pipeline industry, MESA added 5 locations and 140 workforce members, while growing annual revenues from $16 million to $100 million from 2002 to 2013. At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Kelsey May, general counsel at MESA, will share best practices behind this story of phenomenal business growth, with a focus on how MESA has used the Baldrige framework to support its strategy for "responsible growth." In the meantime, she shared the following information in a recent interview. How does MESA’s growth strategy relate to the focus on excellence? MESA is a big believer that the only sustainable method for getting bigger is by getting better. If we continuously improve in all of our six strategic objectives, we’ll continue to be a world-class organization; if we continue to be a world-class organization, we’ll add and keep customers based on what we can do for them. Our six strategic objectives (which rarely change) are outlined in our annual strategic plan, along with assigned action items to drive those objectives forward. Courtesy of MESA What do you see as the key benefit for small businesses like yours of using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence as a management framework? The benefit to using the Baldrige framework is that organizations can tailor the Criteria to suit their needs and their time frame. For example, if your organization is overwhelmed by the idea of "quality management" or the phrase "performance excellence," start with just one area and try to focus on small improvements that will, over time, add up to organizational change. We all have to start somewhere, and there’s no bad place to start—as long as you just start. What are your top tips for organizations beginning to use the Baldrige framework? ·         Communicate: Make sure you have the support of senior leadership and employees. Instigating organizational change is not a one-person challenge, and the only way to truly sustain change and excellence is if everyone is on the same page. ·         Share/steal: The Baldrige community is so generous and open; take advantage of conferences and best-practice sessions. If you’re struggling in a certain area, it’s likely that other organizations have been down the same path and come out on the other side. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel when so many great leaders and organizations are eager to share their stories with you. ·         Keep going: It’s a journey, and one that will take you longer than you might expect. The Baldrige framework is not about an award or a temporary fix. It’s about lasting, continuous improvement and a systematic framework for excellence. You will never "master" the Criteria. Instead, you can use it every year, every month, every day, to ensure that your organization is striving for excellence in every aspect. What’s next in MESA’s Baldrige journey? MESA’s journey within the Criteria, just like our pursuit of excellence, will never end. We still refer to our 2012 feedback report to address the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) that were identified. Although we were lucky enough to receive the award, we were not without our OFIs, and most organizations cannot effectively address every OFI within a single year. So we prioritize those when creating our Strategic Plan and we address the most important. And next year, we’ll do that again, and we’ll do it the year after that. There will always be areas for improvement, but as long as we’re staying on top of them year after year, we’ll continue to be the best organization we can be. To learn more, attend MESA’s presentation, "Using Baldrige for Responsible Business Growth," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Marylandon Tuesday, April 8. 

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Listening to customers. It’s something that any good organization knows that it needs to do to stay in business. But what are some tips for providing customers with feedback opportunities, for using technology to listen, and for diversifying how you listen? Now layer this question on the interesting listening opportunities for Southcentral Foundation, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, whose  system is owned, managed, directed, designed, and driven by Alaska Native people who are referred to as its "customer-owners." In addition, Southcentral’s total coverage area spans some 100,000 square miles, with about one-fifth of the population living in 55 remote villages accessible only by plane. Crystal Lewis, Southcentral improvement specialist, will be speaking on this topic at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference. I asked her and her colleagues about their listening strategies. What are three ways that a health care organization might listen to its customer-owners/customers? By having a shared relationship between the customer-owner and organization By providing customer-owners with feedback opportunities before their visit, after their visit, and even after hours By having more than one way to listen to customers-owners, for example, utilizing technology to improve how we listen What are three things that Southcentral Foundation has learned through listening? Culture and traditions have an influence on health and wellness. Success of the health care system is a shared responsibility. Customer-owners want to be participants of their own health care. What else might folks learn from your session? How customer-owner feedback continually impacts the health care system through the strategic planning cycle Examples of how Southcentral Foundation has used technology to increase response rates and how to turn that data into action To learn more, attend Southcentral Foundation’s special presentation, "Listening to Customer-Owners and Customer Satisfaction," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer The student demographic profile of Jenks Public Schools has significantly changed since the Oklahoma district became a Baldrige Award winner in 2005. The pace and variety of population shifts that Jenks has experienced may resemble those in your own school system’s environment, whether you live in the same region or a southern, northern, eastern, or western U.S. state today. Since 2005, Jenks’s enrollment of prekindergarten through grade 12 students has grown from 9,400 to 11,173. The ethnic mix of that student body has shifted as the numbers of Hispanic, American Indian, African American, and Asian students have each increased by 5% or more, while the proportion of Caucasian students has shrunk from 90% to 66%, from 1990 to 2013. Courtesy of Jenks Public Schools What evidently has not changed at Jenks, according to Lisa Muller, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, is the district’s commitment to improvement and excellence. Muller outlined two key ways in which Jenks’s continued use of the Baldrige Criteria has driven performance improvement over the past nine years. First, she said, "We have refined our Continuous Improvement Model to include the district’s core competencies, an idea which was not around in the Criteria in 2005." Second, she said, "We have developed a school culture framework that reflects the way in which the district seeks to create a positive school culture through the coupling of best practices with strategic thinking and planning," she added. "When combined with our key processes, this framework captures the district’s understanding of who we are as an organization." At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Muller will share guidance on a foundational step in a Baldrige self-assessment: getting started with writing an Organizational Profile. Jenks has used the tool—an essential part of the Baldrige framework—for both self-assessment and for completing the Criteria-based application for the Baldrige Award. Muller and others in her organization see the value of the Organizational Profile as follows:  ·         It encourages valuable conversation about the organization’s identity. ·         It provides opportunities to discuss the organization’s strategic situation. ·         It creates a snapshot in time of the organization, how it operates, and the challenges it faces. ·         It introduces the idea of core competencies. In a recent interview, Muller also shared why Jenks has found it worth the investment of time and other resources to conduct a full self-assessment using the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence. "Jenks Public Schools chose to use the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence because they provide nationally and internationally recognized standards by which to measure organizational performance," she said. "The Criteria not only provided a means of assessing our continuous improvement work in the district during the early stages of our journey but also continue to stretch us as the Criteria themselves improve and change over the years." "While some additional time and resources are required to ‘do Baldrige,’" she added, "we try as much as possible to weave our continuous improvement processes in to the way we do our work and conduct business, rather than viewing organizational improvement as a stand-alone initiative." In addition, she explained that employees from across the district who work in many different roles are involved annually on teams that conduct a thorough review of one Baldrige Criteria category each year. For organizations getting started with Baldrige, Muller offered the following tips based on Jenks’s experience: 1.       Organizations in the earliest stages of the continuous improvement journey will likely find the "Are We Making Progress?" surveys valuable as a starting point. These surveys—one for the senior leadership team and another for other employees (available for free download from the Baldrige Web site via this link)—are based on the Organizational Profile questions in the Baldrige Criteria. 2.      Once the survey results are in, pull together a cross-functional team to analyze the results and discuss potential answers to the questions from the Organizational Profile. 3.      Conduct a gap analysis based on this work; it will likely provide several "jumping off points" for continuous improvement efforts in the organization. To learn more, attend the school district’s presentation, "How to Get Started on Your Organizational Profile," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey How do you deploy learning from the voice of your customers, plus company strategy, to workforce members in every room in the company, every factory floor, every customer service center, both domestic and abroad? That’s one of the questions that Ken Dean, vice president/director Quality Systems, Customer Development Group, for Nestlé Purina PetCare Company, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, will be exploring at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference. I recently had the pleasure of a conversation with Ken to learn more about the context of Nestlé Purina’s voice of the customer strategies and how a division of the largest food company in the world uses tools to ensure that the voice of the customer is gathered, shared, and integrated into company processes. Twenty years ago, Nestlé Purina went through a massive reinvention process companywide. Part of the reinvention was to explore how the company translated its challenges into a future direction that was both customer and process focused, moving away from a direction that was overly function focused. That led to today’s strategy, which gets revised every year for both the long and short terms, to focus continuous improvement activities on customer requirements. This focus ensures that every employee understands what are those customer requirements and how they relate to them and what they do. From this reinvention process and new strategy, the organization made some discoveries: Continuous improvement, Lean, or any other improvement strategy can’t be an add-on to current operations or a "bolt-on accessory." Improvement needs to be integrated with your culture and how you do business. Any strategy requires that you build ownership among the workforce. This means that you have to get people’s buy-in, but understand that some things are non-negotiable, such as safety, health, morals, and ethics. Work on a "demand-pull" approach of people wanting your products, rather than a "supply-push" approach. Efficient measures are noble, but you can wind up with lousy measures. Instead, try for effective measures that are focused, do what they are supposed to do, and are not overburdened with too many different purposes. In addition to more discoveries, part of the presentation will be to present the context for the origination and use of tools that the organization uses to deploy strategy and voice of the customer across the company. To learn more, attend Nestlé Purina PetCare Company’s special presentation, "Operational Excellence Begins with the Customer Voice. . . .," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer When Studer Group® won the Baldrige Award in 2010, the Florida-based consulting firm was noted for leveraging its customer-focused culture to achieve high satisfaction among the health care organizations it coaches in service excellence. In addition to exemplary customer satisfaction results, the small business had been named among the "Top 25 Best Small Companies to Work for in America" by the Society for Human Resource Management and the Great Places to Work Institute for three years in a row. Today Studer Group touts employee engagement results in the 99th percentile for nine consecutive years and recognition as one of the "best small companies to work for in America" for six consecutive years (among the top ten for three of those years). The organization continues to use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to sustain the culture of service excellence that it teaches to other organizations. At the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference, Craig Deao, a member of Studer Group’s senior executive team, will present on how to change an organization’s culture to support excellence. In the following interview, he shares additional information on the Studer Group’s Baldrige journey and insights that other organizations can use. Why is the Baldrige framework useful to service organizations like yours—as well as the health care sector you serve? Since our founding, we have been in pursuit of excellence. As an organization that coaches others on their own journeys to excellence, we believe we must lead with authenticity and be our own best client. As our founder Quint Studer has often said, you can’t take anyone farther than you’ve taken yourself. Assessing our processes, systems, and results against the Baldrige Criteria and Baldrige-worthy organizations continually sharpens our saw. We have found that the Baldrige framework, a nonprescriptive set of criteria, is a perfect complement to our Evidence-Based LeadershipSM framework and the three elements to execution (shown below). Courtesy of Studer Group Our prescriptive leadership operating system aligns goals, behaviors, and systematic processes, serving as an enterprise-wide execution framework. Our framework aligns with the Baldrige framework, resulting in a natural fit for our team. How can an organization use Baldrige-based practices to change its culture? The history of successful organizational improvement journeys proves the need for organizational alignment, from the board to the front line. We believe these three key accelerants to alignment are vital prior to starting successful partnerships: (1) highest-ranking officers who are personally committed to steering the journey, (2) senior executives who hold leaders accountable for metric-based performance outcomes through a performance management and evaluation system, and (3) senior teams who provide their leaders with the skills needed to maximize their own potential by providing mandatory, quarterly leadership training. Through work over more than a decade, we have found that failure to address chronically low-performing members of the team can negatively impact the culture of the organization. Just as damaging is losing high-performing individuals because we’ve failed to reward their successes, and missing out on the opportunity to maximize the potential of the lifeblood of the organization: the solid performers who need mentoring and coaching. A key work process for high-performing organizations includes a consistently practiced, fair, documented, and objective series of discussions with high, solid, and low performers to sustain the momentum for the arduous journey of cultural transformation. This [Baldrige] Criteria give organizations the gift of balance. Too often organizations look toward a specific process improvement methodology as the answer to large-scale organizational improvement, missing the vital roles served by clear alignment of goals, development of leaders, and proven evidence that supports the necessary actions that drive improvement. We frequently hear from smart and passionate yet discouraged leaders who are frustrated by the failure of yet another process improvement effort: one that worked great at first but then regressed a few weeks later. A client CEO, Perry Mustian of Archbold Medical Center in Thomasville, GA, calls this the "pop fizzle." Tell us about Studer Group’s Baldrige journey today. It was truly an honor to receive the Baldrige Award in 2010. Today, Studer Group is just as actively on the journey as we were four years ago. We have made an organizational commitment to reapply for the award when next eligible; until then, we will continue to hone our skills and look for opportunities to get better. To learn more, attend the organization’s presentation, "How to Change the Culture of an Organization," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.   

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In health care settings, clinical integration is a fairly new concept that means the coordination of patient care across conditions, providers, settings, and time in order to achieve care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-focused. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, "clinical integration [between hospitals and between hospitals and physicians] offers both parties the opportunity to coordinate patient interventions, manage quality across the continuum of care, move toward population health management, and pursue true value-based contracting." For 2011 Baldrige Award recipient Schneck Medical Center, clinical integration is a concept to embrace for the good of its communities. And partnering with a competitor—a strategy that may sound foreign in some business sectors—is allowing the 93-bed nonprofit hospital to make the very best care of its patients its utmost priority. Schneck Medical Center and its partner hospital plan to contribute multiple resources, including finances and manpower, to coordinate patient care between the two hospitals and members of both medical staffs, said Tammy Dye, vice president clinical services, chief quality officer. This will include the treatment for acute episodes of illness, the treatment and management of chronic conditions, and a focus on wellness. Schneck’s Suki Wright, director of organizational excellence and innovation, and Dye, said that partnering with a competitor to achieve clinical integration, will allow the hospital to create greater value for its customers by sharing resources and knowledge to integrate efforts, technology, and care improve efficiencies and reduce costs by partnering together to leverage buying power and sharing resources emphasize the work around IHI’s "triple aim" of improving the patient experience, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita cost Wright and Dye, who are speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® conference, offered three tips for how to engage a competitor in such a partnership: Build a foundation of trust and open communication Start with a common goal and shared vision and work from there Bring in a non-biased third party to help with facilitation and building the infrastructure "In health care, the time for agility is now," said Dye. "Having an aligned and focused leadership team with a shared vision working together to sustain and move the strategy forward is essential. Using the Baldrige Criteria has been one of the most impactful tools in our 100-year history and as a result has changed the way our leadership team thinks and makes decisions. I am sure any organization that has implemented and embedded the framework in how it runs its business would agree." To learn more, attend Schneck Medical Center’s special presentation, "Partnering with a Competitor for the Good of Our Communities," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer When Iredell-Statesville Schools (I-SS) earned a Baldrige Award in 2008, its dramatic turnaround story (featured in Baldrige 20/20, pp. 68-72) demonstrated the power of the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to transform a public school system that had been in crisis just six years earlier. Over the past five years, the 21,231-student district in southwestern, North Carolina, has seen its economic-related challenges grow. Cuts in tax-based funding have amounted to millions shaved from annual education budgets. And the number of students poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches has risen by 35 percent (to 43 percent of the student population). Yet, according to Dr. Melanie Taylor, I-SS associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction, the district’s use of the Baldrige framework has helped it keep improving the efficiency of its operations and the effectiveness of its instructional programs. Those improvements, she affirmed, have enabled the district to weather the proverbial storm of decreased funding and increased student needs.    Taylor will be presenting on how to use the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence to drive school and districtwide improvements at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference next week. For the benefit of Blogrige readers, she shared the following information in a recent interview. If you were speaking to a school district that is just discovering the Baldrige Education Criteria as a tool to drive systemwide improvements, what would you suggest as your top three tips? 1. Talk with the staff involved: Help the staff to identify their priority areas for improvement, looking at the data you have to support that, and get them involved in identifying what the "big rocks" are. Sometimes it’s an easy win to get them involved in being part of the solution as well as identifying the problem. It’s not always what the leadership might see as a priority area; if workers see it as a major issue, then they tend to be more engaged in the improvement process and have more buy-in along the way. 2. Use the Baldrige Criteria and the Baldrige processes without using all the Baldrige terminology. Using language that is familiar to the workers is less overwhelming. 3. "Go slow to go fast": Keep a pulse on your staff to see where they are in the transition process through both formal check-in meetings and informal conversations. You need to have a combination of that hard and soft data to monitor. You need some folks to tell you what the reality is on how things are going.  What are some key ways in which the Baldrige framework has benefitted Iredell-Statesville Schools? The Baldrige Criteria has really helped us to align our processes and operate more effectively and efficiently as a school district. It has helped us improve our processes and make those processes more aligned and systematic. Our strategic plan and our school improvement plans and classroom plans are now aligned so that we’re all focusing on the same things, and we’re all clear on what our processes are to reach the targeted outcomes. Courtesy of Iredell-Statesville Schools As a district 12 years ago, we had a lot of people who were doing good things, but they were random things. We didn’t really know what was working and what was not working. We didn’t have any good processes in place so that we could share and replicate things that were having a positive impact for students. It’s important to note that our per-pupil expenditure has consistently been low—in the bottom 10 school districts out of 115 in the state (11oth for the past couple of years)—so [using the Baldrige framework] has allowed us to do a lot of things very effectively with very low funding. With all the cuts that public school districts all across the nation have right now, it’s really important to make sure that you’re using your funding in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Despite cuts in funding—we’ve lost $12 million over the last five to six years—we’ve been able to expand programs and continue to increase our academic ranking and our graduation rate. And our academic performance has been improving even though we also have more students from economically disadvantaged families than we did six years ago. Would you share more about your performance improvements and results? Our graduation rate has improved from 61% in 2002 to 88.1% for 2013-2014, and our other metrics also show great growth. Our district’s academic ranking in the state moved from 55th in 2002 to 23rd best in 2013. Our students’ average SAT scores have moved us from a ranking of 57th in North Carolina in 2002 to 13th best in 2013. In 2002, we had a negative fund balance of $2.5 million; because we have been able to operate more efficiently, our fund balance reached $8.76 million in 2013. As a result, we have been able to increase offerings for students, for example, high school credit recovery courses increased from 500 in 2002 to more than 1,000 in 2013. How can other school districts learn more? If a school district would like to contact us to learn more or come visit us to see what this looks like in action, we’d certainly be willing to share. Educational leaders and others can also attend the school district’s presentation, "Using the Baldrige Criteria to Drive Improvement," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday, April 8.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Why should and how might an organization integrate the Lean methodology with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? When I asked Pattie Skriba, vice president, Business Excellence, of Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, she said that it has to do with "MUDA 無駄." "MUDA is a Japanese word," she continued, "that means ‘waste’ or non-value-added steps in a process that result in inefficiencies, customer dissatisfaction, and reduced profitability. As a patient, you’ve probably experienced ‘waste’—waiting to see your doctor, delays in treatment, unnecessary tests, or multiple forms requiring the same information. Waste is any activity that you, as a customer, would not pay for." Skriba, who is speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® conference, went on to explain. "Baldrige and Lean share a common purpose: value-creation (Criteria for Performance Excellence, 1.1b, 6.1). Baldrige and Lean also share a common focus: process. But Baldrige and Lean are also different." "Lean methodology is a compilation of systematic approaches to remove waste and improve processes and if fully embraced builds a culture of continual improvement. Baldrige, however, is a balanced, business model spanning not only operations improvement but also other critical elements to an organization’s sustainability, such as leadership, strategic planning and implementation, workforce capability, and knowledge management." Skriba continued, "Lean methodology can address many of the criteria in a powerful way.  However, the adoption of the entire Baldrige performance management framework will guide an organization to broader role-model performance. When the two are integrated and ‘operate as a fully interconnected unit’ [Criteria glossary], there is an acceleration of performance and creation of value." So how can the two approaches be integrated? Pattie shared several examples. "At the most basic level, Lean tools can be adopted as the systematic approaches to address some of the individual Criteria items. At Advocate Good Samaritan, senior leaders selected A3 [Lean problem-solving process] combined with the plan-do-study-act [PDSA] methodology as our ‘performance improvement approach’ [Criteria, item P.2c]. This approach is visual and easy to understand (and remember); it creates a true community of problem-solvers as it is deployed to every level of the organization. For example, A3-PDSA is used to ‘create and modify action plans’ [Criteria item 2.2], ‘improve organizational performance’ [Criteria item 4.1], and ‘improve health care services and work processes’ [Criteria item 6.1], and it is the framework for how personal leadership skills are developed [Criteria items 1.2, 5.2]." Skriba went on to share other examples of how Lean methodology can address Criteria items. Criteria item 6.2 asks how organizations control the costs of operations. Kanban (Lean scheduling system) or 2-bin system (Lean inventory control system) is a systematic approach to controlling the costs of supplies. Advocate Good Samaritan’s deployment of this Lean approach led to a dramatic reduction in inventory supply costs by almost 40% between 2012 and 2013. Department visual management is used to "ensure that the day-to-day operation of work processes meet requirements" and lead to "the in-process measures used to control and improve those processes" (Criteria item, 6.1b). "We use visual management to control processes such as reduction in our ventilator days, productivity, and recruitment of physicians yielding excellent outcomes," Skriba explained. Standard work, a foundational concept of Lean, is a simple, written description of the safest, highest-quality, most-efficient way known to perform a task or achieve an outcome. "In both clinical and nonclinical areas, standard work is used for deploying key processes," Skriba said.  "This reduces variability caregiver to caregiver." Standard work has enabled Advocate Good Samaritan to achieve and sustain top-decile performance in several clinical outcomes including the reduction of patient falls. "The Lean approach can also be the ‘L’ in ADLI [Baldrige's evaluation process that focuses on approach-deployment-learning-and integration]. It becomes the improvement engine for every defined approach in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational processes such as strategic planning, hiring, and performance management can be looked at through the Lean lens to remove waste and improve. Again, at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, A3-PDSA is utilized to improve these Baldrige-driven processes." To learn more about how Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital reduces MUDA, attend its special presentation, "Integration of Lean with Baldrige," at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Pewaukee School District Ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award Recipients (pictured from left to right): U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Pewaukee School District Board of Education Clerk Larry Dux, Pewaukee School District Superintendent JoAnn Sternke, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. "It may seem like Baldrige is all results and processes," said JoAnn Sternke, superintendent of the Wisconsin district honored at the official ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award winners Sunday evening in Baltimore, Maryland. "But at the heart there’s a culture around continuous improvement [and] also around a passion for core values. And at the heart of the Pewaukee School District’s journey are incredibly passionate people …  and they come to work each and every day wanting to do a great job serving kids and families." Sternke accepted the Baldrige Award on behalf of her suburban school district’s board of education, 312 employees, and 2,800 students. In congratulating the other 2013 Baldrige Award winner, Sutter Davis Hospital, Sternke compared the life-saving missions of the two organizations and sectors, noting, "You literally save lives; we do it by giving students life chances, and we take that very, very seriously. We’ve learned so much from our friends in health care because we share those ‘heart tugging’ missions." Sternke recalled that her school district began its "journey" of continuous improvement many years ago and that it has had a strategic planning process in place for over 20 years. "Our visionary board of education created a strand in 1998 called Quality Systematic Improvement," she noted. She credited Larry Dux, a member of the board of education and its current clerk, for seeing in 2006 how the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence framework "fits us." "Since then we have dedicated ourselves to being systematic in the use of the Baldrige continuous improvement process," continued Sternke, "and … we’ve seen student achievement go up in ways that we never thought imaginable. We’ve become more efficient and more effective. And these successes aren’t just figures and statistics; they do change lives. And in the process, we’ve become an innovative force in education." "We’re transforming how we deliver learning for our students, and that’s creating life chances, and that’s opening the door to each child’s future," she added. In concluding her remarks, Sternke said, "For those pondering whether or not to pursue this Baldrige process, I say boldly, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’" Sutter Davis Hospital Ceremony for 2013 Baldrige Award Recipients (pictured from left to right): U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Sutter Health Sacramento Sierra Region President James Conforti, Sutter Davis Hospital CEO Janet Wagner, and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. "Sutter Davis Hospital is a small community hospital," said CEO Janet Wagner, speaking at the Baldrige Award ceremony Sunday evening. "In fact, we are one of the smallest full-service hospitals in the Sutter Health system, with a lot of good results. And I’m proud to be a voice tonight for small hospitals." Wagner said that her organization’s adoption of the Baldrige framework for performance excellence "grew from a desire to deliver the safest, quality care to the communities we serve." In looking to move from being a good organization to become a great one, Wagner recalled, "We needed a framework to challenge our assumptions, guide our process improvements, and focus our team on sustaining results. Thus began our Baldrige journey." The effort "was not always easy," acknowledged Wagner. "Some thought the journey was going to be too much work; some thought we didn’t have all the resources we needed—because, after all, we are a hospital, we are open 24 hours a day, we never close, so we stay busy." But she noted that over the last six to eight years, Sutter Davis Hospital stayed the course with its focus on continuous improvement, guided by the Baldrige Criteria, engaging the staff, physicians, and volunteers, as well as collaborating with community partners, particularly the hospital’s federally qualified health clinics. Among remarkable results achieved and sustained by the hospital in recent years, Wagner highlighted its top-decile patient satisfaction and clinical quality outcomes. She noted that Sutter Davis Hospital has been named among "Top 100 Hospitals" in the nation by Truven Health Analytics. She also pointed to the hospital’s reduction in wait times and 30-day readmission rates for the emergency room. Wagner added, "The Sutter Davis team has created a culture of accountability when it comes to our patients and families and has truly demonstrated transforming care—the kind of care that we want to see delivered in our country."    

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey A turtle is the mascot that staff members of 2013 Baldrige Award recipient Sutter Davis Hospital chose as their representative. A turtle is a survivor, it has a long life-span, and it has a hard shell. Because in health care, said Sutter Davis CEO Janet Wagner, sometimes you have to have a thick skin, and sometimes when you embark on a Baldrige continuous improvement journey, you have to retreat into a shell to self-assess in order to take the next step forward. Sutter Davis Hospital CEO Janet Wagner, speaking at the Baldrige Award ceremony on April 6, 2014. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. During the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference, Wagner described Sutter Davis’s leadership lessons learned during its seven-year journey to implement the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence as a management framework. The 48-bed, nonprofit, acute care hospital began its journey by identifying its core competency-a Criteria concept meaning what your organization is best at, something that cannot be easily replicated or copied by the competition, and something that gives you a market advantage. The hospital identified its core competency as a "culture of caring." "We really believe [in this culture,]" Wagner said. "When someone comes into our care, we want them to feel safe, to realize that they are getting the best possible care that we have to offer. In addition, we want people to feel our culture of caring when they walk into our hospital with eye contact, with friendliness, with just making people feel as if they are at home." The culture is encompassed in how we care for our patients, how we care for our physicians, and how we care for each other as team members, she added; the core competency for Sutter Davis is the "glue that holds it all together." Wagner said that understanding its core competency and integrating the Criteria did not come easily or quickly. In its first Baldrige-based state award application, the hospital, which is part of a large, integrated system in northern California, originally had three core competencies. Using examiner feedback, Sutter Davis continually refined its core competency over the years, including talking to all of its employees and physicians about what a "culture of caring" means. Staff members gave about 400 different answers. So the leadership team set out to define what such a culture meant and how people were going to live it each and every day. "That led us to the understanding that the Criteria really focused us; it really kept us on track," she said." To stay on track and get results for our patients-both quality and safety-you have to have an engaged workforce. . . When everyone’s engaged, we have very consistent results." To aid engagement, Wagner suggested making some employee events fun, so that the learning really sticks. And the key was that the leadership team joined in the fun. In Sutter Davis’s case, one learning was the need to embrace change. "Organizations don’t change. It’s the people inside the organizations that change," Wagner said. Another breakthrough learning from Baldrige regarded results, she said. The  goal was not only to get improved results but to learn to sustain them. And leadership team members at Sutter Davis took it a step farther-they learned to course correct as a team, taking a step back to evaluate results when needed; such a strategy led the hospital to actual be able to reliably predict its results. There was another lesson learned from the Criteria in regards to the leadership system. Wagner said her leadership team members talked about how they lead (category 1 of the Criteria), but they didn’t write it down. After the third year, they wrote down the core of the leadership system, with patient-centered care first and a never-ending circle of leadership that includes values, how to execute the strategy, and accountability. "Our aha moments from reading the Criteria were actually more self-created than getting awards or recognition along the way because we were so excited about understanding the Criteria and really making the leap," she said, "and this was one of them-having a strong leadership system in place that we could then evaluate for effectiveness." Sutter Davis has dashboards for each facility, with cascading priorities to each department. From there, one-page department profiles are created to show how that department is contributing to the dashboard, and this goes all the way down to the individual employee, whose work is aligned across pillars. Because of these tools, "Every employee knows exactly what and how they are contributing to the overall success of Sutter Davis Hospital," she said. Another benefit learned from Baldrige, Wagner said, was the challenge of improving the care of its community; health care organizations have always been involved in their communities but have rarely been challenged to really improve and measure the care of those communities. So, Sutter Davis set out to ensure that every child in its community was covered by insurance and immunized. For kindergarten, nearly 90% of children in Yolo county are now immunized-and the county includes many migrant workers, indigent populations, and non-English speakers. "I have learned to love that Criteria," Wagner said, with the leadership team "using that book now more than ever." Leadership team members have really focused on the word "personal" that appears in Criteria item 1.1-how do senior leaders personally contribute? "It wasn’t until we began really owning [leadership] individually on a personal basis, living it, role-modeling those values that are in our leadership system and being accountable to ourselves first and then holding each other accountable that we really narrowed in on that personal touch on being a senior leader and what it means to be a senior leader." Sutter Davis is still working on some common health care obstacles to get to its ultimate goal of seamless and continuous care, whether the care is received in a hospital, physician’s office, or urgent care. Wagner added, "Feedback [received from submitting Baldrige Award applications] is what has helped to propel our organization forward year over year-not being defensive about it but really understanding it and putting it into practice."

Posted by Christine Schaefer Pewaukee School District Superintendent JoAnn Sternke likened her small organization’s persistence on its journey to excellence to that of the small engine in The Little Engine That Could, as she spoke during the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference®. The beloved children’s book, she noted, highlights the "tenacity and persistence" of the little engine that helps the train that breaks down: "That’s us … we’re a … small little school district. I hope our story inspires all of the small organizations, in this room and not in this room, because if you think you can, and you employ the principles of Baldrige with that same level of perseverance, you really can achieve great things." "We did it with a can-do attitude and a love of our mission," Sternke said of her district’s journey to reach the level of excellence that enabled it to earn the 2013 Baldrige Award. She recounted how Pewaukee’s journey to excellence began in 2007, a year after she was first handed a Criteria for Performance Excellence booklet from a member of her district’s board of education. Pewaukee School District Superintendent JoAnn Sternke, speaking at the Baldrige Award ceremony on April 6, 2014. Photo by Eddie Arrossi. Sternke said she made a commitment to writing a Baldrige application within a year and to ensuring that the district’s leadership team would be trained as Baldrige examiners. In 2007, the district submitted its first award application to the Wisconsin Center for Performance Excellence (an Alliance for Performance Excellence member and state partner of the national Baldrige Performance Excellence Program). The Wisconsin program provided "wonderful feedback," said Sternke, and the district used the feedback report to work on improving its processes and results. "I loved the Criteria right from the start," said Sternke, citing how "it could be used in any sector." She added, "I think that education is sometimes too myopic looking inside to fix problems as opposed to looking outside." "I also love that the Criteria would work for everyone in our organization," she said. "Whether you are our director of buildings and grounds or you are our middle school principal, you can talk the same language of improvement at the table using the Criteria." She said the Organizational Profile of the Criteria proved valuable in the early stages of Pewaukee’s Baldrige journey because the prefatory self-assessment questions "offered an opportunity to get to know ourselves." Sternke named three areas of focus for the district today as it prepares students for the future: (1) student engagement in learning, (2) higher student achievement, and (3) student citizenship (which Sternke described as "making sure that we graduate good people"). She also shared these five keys to improvement for the district’s leadership system: 1.       People: Sternke described the aim as bringing on employees who are mission-driven and then engaging and training them to put the mission into action. 2.      Plans: Sternke pointed out how the district has used strategic planning since 1992 but has gotten better at it over the years as it has used Baldrige feedback to improve its strategic planning process. 3.      Results: Sternke noted how the district has gotten better at using data to make improvements and using measurement as a process. 4.      Processes: The Pewaukee district uses Plan, Do, Study, Act as its improvement methodology. "Ultimately we learned we had to improve our processes to get better," said Sternke. 5.      Innovation: Sternke described the "paradoxical secret" that came as a surprise during Pewaukee’s Baldrige journey: "By using a systems approach which some people would find constraining, it ultimately allowed us to think more freely and come up with innovations in our delivery model, not only for transportation and facilities, but for the very instruction that we provide to students," she said. "So it wasn’t just the best way to improve results; it actually got us better as a whole organization." The district is now seen as an innovation center for its use of technology, she said. She offered these answers to the question, Why Baldrige? ·         "Because before we used [the Baldrige Criteria], we were hard-working, but now we’re more effective and efficient." ·         "Because [Baldrige] allowed us to leverage our strength in planning and get better to reach new heights of achievement." ·         "Because [Baldrige] allows us to make sure that we are using results to drive improvement." ·         "Because by using a systematic approach, we became more innovative." Pewaukee School District is located in southeastern Wisconsin 20 miles west of Milwaukee. During Sternke’s tenure as superintendent since 2001, she has overseen several program improvements to increase student achievement. These include a nationally recognized initiative that provides laptop computers for every student in grades 5 through 12, a four-year-old kindergarten program, foreign language instruction in elementary grades, advanced course offerings for high school students with Northwestern University, and increased graduation requirements for high school students. Noteworthy results that the district has improved in recent years include a high school graduation rate of over 97%, one of the highest in the state of Wisconsin; and an increase in the proportion of high school graduates who go on to college, to over 90% today.

Posted by Christine Schaefer The visionary leader of the first health care organization to receive a Baldrige Award in 2002 still credits a 1999 feedback report for helping her organization become exceptional. "The feedback was humbling at the very least, but helpful, insightful, and transformative," said Sister Mary Jean Ryan, former president and CEO of SSM Health Care and now board chair. The organization’s first Baldrige feedback report, she said yesterday, provided "the clarity and focus we desperately needed to move our organization closer to exceptional." Sister Mary Jean Ryan Sister Mary Jean described pivotal events in SSM Health Care’s journey to excellence during her keynote address at the Baldrige Program’s 26th Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore. She noted that her organization’s 1999 Baldrige feedback report spurred the organization to reconsider how it defined exceptional in relation to its performance, particularly the excellent health care results it aspired to achieve. The feedback report pointed out that the organization’s aim of providing "exceptional health care services" was at odds with its use of average results for performance comparisons. In defining exceptional performance in response to the feedback, the organization developed a focused approach to goal setting in each of these areas: satisfaction (of patients, employees, and physicians), clinical and safety outcomes, and financial performance. It then began to compare itself to best-performing organizations as it sought to improve and excel. Sister Mary Jean offered additional insights on excellence through inspirational stories. She described the example of her religious order’s five original sisters in America, who survived great challenges in the 19th century as they began their ministry in St. Louis. Their example provided the legacy of caring for the work of SSM Health Care today and "is the reason I was so demanding when I was a CEO," said Sister Mary Jean. "You see, it was up to me to ensure that the 24,000 employees, 5,800-plus physicians, and 3,000 volunteers of SSM Health Care knew that they had to deliver exceptional health care to every single patient." She added, "If you remember only one thing from my remarks, I hope it is this: Our success as an organization is not the exclusive right of executives or managers." She recalled that when she became president and CEO of SSM Health Care in 1986, she saw "an organization that was only slightly better than average." She found this unacceptable. Instead, she looked for the same "potential for greatness" in the organization that her religious order had taught her to look for and cultivate in individuals. "We were not as good as we could or should be," she said of the organization. "Instead of constantly seeking to improve, people seemed to be satisfied with the way things were," she added. "We were pleased to say that we were as good as the national average." But complacency with the status quo began to change as the organization began to improve its processes and adopted the Baldrige framework. "I can say without reservation that because of Baldrige we are much closer to achieving our mission today than ever before," she said. "And that equates to being a better organization than we were when we began our quality journey."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey To focus leadership on the things that really matter-that was the foundation of Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter‘s five mantras, shared with the audience at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore, Md. Kanter, who served on the Baldrige Board of Overseers when health care and education were added to the eligibility categories of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, gave advice to leaders on "how to ensure the impact you want." Kanter’s favorite mantras are phrases, ideas, and concepts that she writes about and teaches at Harvard Business School. Following are the first two of five favorite mantras that she presented in her keynote address. #1 Think Outside the Building Kanter said, "Many people know the famous phrase ‘think outside the box,’ but the box just isn’t big enough . . . and that’s true in every sector because the business is not just its financial performance or even its customer metrics." Kanter suggested that leaders, "Get out of the building to where the people are. Thinking outside the building is the first imperative for impact." In New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, buildings for schools and hospitals had to be rebuilt, but instead of building the full-service central hospital, mobile clinics were built to bring the care to where the people were and schools became community gathering points. These are "connections across problems," she said, and there is a need for innovative thinkers to think outside structures to solve problems across disciplines and establishments. An example of "thinking outside the building," she said, is an educational innovation that was initiated by IBM: a six-year high school in Brooklyn, NY, called Pathways in Technology Early College High School. IBM, which was concerned about the state of education, worked closely with the public system, creating a collaboration among the K-12 school, the community college, and the corporation. Students graduate with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, and a job interview. The city of Chicago is now opening five schools following this model, the city of New York is putting in more, and the state of New York is starting 16. Such an innovation solves "multiple problems simultaneously, of connections to employers, skills that are needed, high academic performance, keeping kids in school," she said. This style of thinking is "a whole new concept. It’s not just do what we’re doing even better. . . . but think about how you’re going to connect assets that exist outside the building, in the community, as other resources to get things done." Another example is a program that Kanter started with two colleagues called the Advanced Leadership Initiative because they realized there’s an opportunity in higher education for experienced leaders transitioning from their income-generating years to their next years of service. "Surrounding us are all types of opportunities," Kanter added. #2 Act Bigger Than You Are "This means act as though you can take on big problems," she said. What creates jobs is imagination, she said, "the ability to imagine something bigger and set out to do it." Kanter cited the example of Dr. Donald Berwick founding a small nonprofit-the Institute for Healthcare Improvement-to change all of health care with campaigns to save and protect lives. As one individual, Berwick thought big ideas about improving patient safety, influenced by Baldrige and the quality movement, Kanter said. He leveraged others to take part in the campaign. "The greatest opportunities for innovation come from the gaps, the things we’re not seeing." "Think bigger!" she said. "I’m frustrated sometimes by people who have it all there and yet don’t think bigger. . . . Think about where you could ultimately be. . . . Go for the big prize. Stand as equals with anybody." She added, "One thing that I love about the Baldrige and always have is . . .  the obligation of winners to teach others," she said. "That’s another way of encouraging others to think bigger. And now the mission is getting the world to do what you do and not think of it as . . . competition."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In a keynote address at the Baldrige Program’s recent Quest for Excellence® Conference, Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter shared key insights in the form of five of her favorite mantras. Friday we shared the first two; following are the other three. #3 It Takes a Cross-Sector, Multistakeholder Coalition "It takes a village" is an African proverb, but according to Kanter, success today takes a "cross-sector, multistakeholder coalition." According to Kanter, at Harvard University Advanced Leadership meetings, dignified leaders who have served as CEOs, venture capitalists, hospital system CEOs, physicians, managing partners at law firms, and government cabinet members still have to be taught "to think across sectors, not to think adversarially about government versus business versus whatever . . . but really always think cross-sector multistakeholder—who has to be at the table, from outside the building, to think bigger, to solve problems?" As an example of such a coalition, Kanter described the city of Milwaukee’s success moving from an aging industrial city to a global water hub (one of three global water hubs in the world). Members from the community, including the business community, are collaborating to turn the infrastructure into one that focuses on what all of the declining industrial businesses had in common: water. Now Milwaukee businesses are making products and services leveraging water technology; a water council is redefining the city across industries; a graduate school is offering fresh water sciences; and entrepreneurs are turning abandoned factories into fish farms. In these factories, they are also growing sprouts as a healthy snack for Milwaukee’s school children. #4 It’s Not Easy "Kanter’s law," she said, "is that everything can look like a failure in the middle because when you are doing things that are new and different . . . there can be naysayers. . . . There are so many obstacles and road blocks on the journey that the difference between success and failure is how long you give it before you give up." A typical obstacle is forecasting problems, said Kanter. It’s difficult to know how long something is going to take and how much it is going to cost—something we all have a tendency to underestimate, she added. Kanter stressed persistence and willingness to deliver as characteristics of success. "We know a ton of things are going to happen to throw [you] off. . . . Sometimes it’s more important to do it better the second time because you can’t always the first time get it right," she said. The middles of new projects and initiatives can be tense times, she said, "you hit obstacles you didn’t know were there because you’ve never gone down that road before. . . . The middles are another time [to be] in touch with your cross-sector multistakeholder coalition." Kanter said that she loves small improvements, quick wings, but if change involves anything big (which she encourages), "you have to persist and persevere, you have to have continuity of leadership. . . . There has to be a really dedicated team, and I also go back to mission and purpose. If you don’t have a strong sense of why you’re doing this and whom you are doing this for, it’s way too easy to give up. And giving up is by definition a failure." #5 The Happiest People Solve the Most Difficult Problems "If you really want to motivate your staff," Kanter said, "it’s not by making the work easier but by making it more challenging." She said people seek out jobs in Silicon Valley and high-tech companies because they get to stretch, to learn new things, to have impact. "The happiest people I know, amazingly, miraculously, are working on things that seem intractable," she said. "Now they have to get over the sense of discouragement in the middle, but they have a sense of purpose, meaning, mastery, challenge, along with membership in community and a sense of meaning."

Posted by Christine Schaefer In a recent post here, we shared insights from Gallup strategist Dr. John Timmerman on achieving customer-focused excellence. In the interview, Timmerman pointed out that the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide "the holistic framework to assess all the dimensions of an organization required for driving excellence." Now let’s look at how Timmerman and others at Gallup have used the Baldrige framework in helping client organizations keep the "promise" of their brand in terms of the value perceived by their customers. In this September 2013 article in Gallup Business Journal, Timmerman and his Gallup colleague Stephen Shields state, "To deliver on its brand promise, the first thing a company must do is align all the elements that contribute to an exceptional and differentiated customer experience: customer knowledge, strategy, process design, human capital, measurement, and leadership. These elements are consistent with the well-known Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence." Timmerman and Shields conclude, "Operationalizing a brand promise isn’t easy and requires a holistic framework to ensure alignment from marketing to each moment of truth." Users of the Baldrige Criteria know of such a framework, and so does Timmerman. As he further shared in our interview, "We use the Baldrige framework at Gallup to teach organizations all the important factors required to delivering the brand promise."    He then noted, "In fact, I went through the Gallup research to develop an education consulting model to teach companies to deliver and execute their brand promise—because they create it on paper, but then it’s a very different thing to actually have employees activate it and have it come to light—and when we looked at all our companies’ best practices from the clients that we work with, they all naturally fell into the Baldrige framework." He added that clients’ best practices could be put in "buckets" encompassing "customer focus, leadership systems, strategy development and deployment, … human capital, process management design, and information and measurement." Timmerman and others at Gallup then developed a schematic (see below) using the Baldrige framework "as a way to frame up how to deliver a brand promise." Used with Permission We hope you have found this information helpful to your own organization’s current or potential future use of the Baldrige framework to improve its performance and excel. Please consider sharing your experiences with us.      

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon For as long as the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence have existed, and probably longer, educators have debated whether the student is the customer or the product. In a 2010 New York Times Opinion piece, a number of business school deans debated this question with some interesting observations. As a society, we have also questioned the roles of families as customers. But this blog post is about neither of those customer groups. It is about businesses in the school’s service area, an even less considered customer group. Consider this recent statistic: 96% of college provosts believe their students are prepared for the job market. That compares to 14% of the public, and 11% of business leaders. How can such a gap exist and persist? Probably because there is a lack of appropriate communication between colleges and business leaders. There is lots of communication about donations and recruiting on campus, but satisfaction with the education students receive? Complacency is almost certainly one culprit. Schools know the "important" subject matter and businesses know they have a significant role in training and developing new graduates. I suggest some questions for schools to start the dialog between business leaders and college provosts. The questions come from the Baldrige education criteria items on Voice of the Customer and Customer-Focused Results: How do you determine student and other customer satisfaction and engagement? How do you determine student and other customer dissatisfaction? How do your measurements capture actionable information to use in exceeding their expectations and securing their engagement for the long term? What are your current levels and trends in key measures of their satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and engagement? How would your Alma Mater respond?  

Posted by Christine Schaefer One of the strengths of Baldrige Award-winning Pewaukee School District today is its systematic process for strategic planning. But Pewaukee leaders and staff members readily admit that the mature process today represents a lot of progress. Twenty years ago, "we weren’t that good at strategic planning," said Brian Kammers, the vice president of the district’s board of education. "We got to the point of seeing it as a comprehensive process." In 1992, Pewaukee High School Principal Marty Van Hulle was involved in the district’s first strategic planning effort, working alongside "a handful" of board of education members and administrators. "It wasn’t necessarily strategic," he said of the early process. "We were blind squirrels looking for nuts." Kammers and Van Hulle presented the story, steps, and successes of the ever-improving process during the Baldrige Program’s recent Quest for Excellence® Conference in Baltimore. The district’s stepwise process for strategic planning today encompasses Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) methodology. At the end of the process, "we celebrate successes," said Kammers. The strategic plan reflects five key focus areas, which have not changed in recent years: teaching and learning, workforce engagement and development, communications and community engagement, technology, and facilities and operations. The district has staff members shepherd each of the areas of the strategic plan, and they act as process owners. "What we’re trying to do is to break up the plan into pieces" that can be acted upon by many individuals," said Van Hulle. He also explained how the plan is aligned at every level of the school district. Since, for example, Van Hulle as a principal sees the teaching and learning area as "my piece," he noted that a goal on which he has focused is to increase the percentage of college- and career-ready mathematics students from 55% to 70% by June 2014, an improvement of 15% over three years. The process, he added, "has put us all on the same page relative to the strategic goals of the plan." The strategic planning process ensures accountability at the building level through 90-day/quarterly updates in which each principal meets with the superintendent to present school-level progress on plans. Alignment and accountability at the teacher level, Van Hulle explained, is demonstrated through teacher plans in which they set growth targets and instructional strategies, including designating groups of students targeted for help. The entire district is involved in constant PDSA cycles of improvement, and a widely inclusive group of stakeholders (representing parents, students, teachers, other employees, citizens, school board members, local government officials, and partners and collaborators) gather annually during the planning phase. Data are reviewed by leaders each summer, and the strategic plan is updated annually in a formal process lasting one to five days. Pewaukee School District staff members and others gather for a strategic planning session. Photo used with the district’s permission. The school board is also focused on aligning and improving the strategic plan. As Kammers explained, every year board members "work on the strategic plan and make sure that the actions take place and that we make progress. We make sure that it flows down to every level of the organization." Van Hulle offered the following steps for other organizations that wish to proceed similarly to create a strategic plan: • Determine your values and goals (from mission) • Conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and an environmental scan. • Determine strategy areas and create action plans. • Publish and share the strategic plan with all. • Monitor and create accountability systems. The hard part is the monitoring and accountability systems, said Van Hulle. He pointed out that his district publicly posts the strategies and goals of its plan on its Web site. "The idea is to be very transparent about the work of the school district," he said. Results accomplished through strategic planning, Kammers noted, include the district’s high school graduation rate of over 97 percent today, significant improvement on a key college-readiness measure, and an average student ACT score of 23.7 today (compared to a national average of 21.1). Other benefits of the process, said Kammers, are that it "allows us to anticipate student and stakeholder needs" and become results-focused. The strategic planning process, he said, "has helped us focus on what really matters and keep an eye on the future."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Senior leaders at Baldrige Award recipient Sutter Davis Hospital (SDH) were recently asked how using the Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence helps to prepare their organization for the Affordable Care Act and the challenges that come with it. "Right now we prepare ourselves just by becoming more efficient and effective, making sure that the care provided along the continuum is at the right place at the right time . . . and having that appropriateness," answered SDH CEO Janet Wagner. "Probably the biggest gift from [our] Baldrige journey is process improvement and measurement. Improving our processes to become more efficient" is how the hospital is preparing for the unknowns surrounding the act and more people sign up for health care products. Deven Merchant, SDH’s chief medical executive, said, "The Baldrige framework has given us a wonderful opportunity to work on the conditions of care to be more affordable and to be more efficient in the care delivery to our community." In a recent blog at Core Values Partners, Steve George writes, "The implementation of the Affordable Care Act will stress a health care system that is already under the strain of an aging baby boomer population. . . . To help manage the rapidly approaching ‘new normal,’ high-performing hospitals and medical centers across the country are integrating the Baldrige model." George goes on to highlight benefits of the Baldrige model for health care: Robust strategic plans that reveal an organization’s key challenges and advantages, core competencies, risks to sustainability, blind spots, and ability to execute the plan Workforce engagement, including of physicians and staff focusing on patients, developing innovative approaches, and achieving the organization’s action plans More efficient and effective processes "Organizations that seek proven options for strengthening their management systems, especially at a time when those systems face growing pressure, turn to Baldrige because it addresses the entire system," said George. "It helps leaders identify the most critical areas to improve and take immediate actions to enhance performance. As the Baldrige model becomes integrated into the way organizations do business, leaders gain control over all of the elements that contribute to performance excellence." At SDH, senior leaders are attempting to gain that control. "Keeping a focus on the [Baldrige] framework will keep us on that steady road to the Affordable Care Act and to address the challenges," added Carolyn Campos, manager of the SDH Birthing Center. How is your health care organization preparing for the Affordable Care Act?

Posted by Christine Schaefer In a previous Blogrige post, we shared insights from Gallup Senior Strategist Dr. John Timmerman on achieving customer-focused excellence. In the interview, Timmerman pointed out that the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide "the holistic framework to assess all the dimensions of an organization required for operationalizing their brand promise." Now let’s look at how Timmerman has used the Baldrige framework in helping organizations keep the "promise" of their brand in terms of the value perceived by their customers. In this September 2013 article in Gallup Business Journal, Timmerman states, "To deliver on its brand promise, the first thing a company must do is align all the elements that contribute to an exceptional and differentiated customer experience: customer knowledge, strategy, process design, human capital, measurement, and leadership. These elements are consistent with the well-known Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence." In the Gallup Business Journal article, Timmerman also writes, "Operationalizing a brand promise isn’t easy and requires an integrated framework to ensure alignment from marketing to each moment of truth." Users of the Baldrige Criteria know of such a framework, and so does Timmerman. As he further shared in our interview, "I utilize the principles of the Baldrige framework to outline all the important factors that they need to deliver on their brand promise." He then noted, "In fact, I went through the Gallup research to develop an Executive Seminar to teach companies to deliver and execute their brand promise—because they create it on paper, but then it’s a very different thing to actually have employees activate it and have it come to light—and when we looked at all our companies’ best practices from the clients that we work with, they all naturally fell into the Baldrige framework." Using a vehicle analogy, Timmerman referred to the Baldrige Criteria items related to strategy, leadership, and customer knowledge as the "GPS of the Brand Promise Model" that defines the organizational direction. Whereas the human capital is the engine that delivers organizational horsepower, he said, process design defines the manufacturing style of the vehicle, and measurement provides the dashboard of critical measures. "Most organizations do a good job of managing a few of these criteria but few execute them all consistently well," he said. "That’s why many organizations swim in the sea of sameness, have flat customer engagement scores, and struggle with cultural transformation. They take a narrow program and not a holistic, systems view of the organization." Timmerman developed a schematic (see below) using the Baldrige framework "as a way to frame up how to deliver a brand promise." He noted that clients’ best practices could be put in "buckets" encompassing customer focus, leadership, strategy, human capital, process design, and measurement. With so many organizations trying to implement a customer experience program in a vacuum, he added, the framework illustrates that "all the wheels and sprockets of the model need to be calibrated in delivering a consistent brand promise."  Graphic from Gallup; used with permission. We hope you find this information helpful to your own organization’s current or future use of the Baldrige framework to improve performance and excel. Please consider sharing your experiences with us.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey At recent question-and-answer panel discussions, Baldrige Award recipient senior leaders from Sutter Davis Hospital and Pewaukee School District fielded audience questions-from managing organizational change to overcoming the challenges that they faced in implementing the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. Following are some of their insights. How do you lead an organization that is changing its culture? Make sure people understand your mission so that they can both see it and live it. "Culture is a product of a thousand conversations"—keep the communication ongoing. Ensure that the culture is built on shared values. Understand that culture takes time to build. (CEO turnover can therefore be problematic.) Define your culture so that you can have expectations to which people are held accountable—and ensure that you do hold them accountable. Role model behaviors that define the culture. How do you promote innovation in your organization? As dramatic results can come from just one idea, plant the seeds of process improvement in all employees. Recognize employees with innovative ideas that lead to new value and demonstrate breakthrough results. Involve staff members at every level of the organization and ensure that they feel that their innovative ideas are heard. (Watch the "yeah, but" when someone brings a good idea forward.) Align goals with strategic objectives, so that all staff members know what they’re working toward. Encourage the sharing of best practices. Provide systems for time and collaboration so that good ideas can percolate. Put egos aside and realize that better ideas than yours may come from your teammates. Allow employees to do what they do best, and give them opportunities to do what they do best more. Build an environment of relationships and trust, where it is safe to bring ideas forward. How do you help frontline staff understand the Baldrige Criteria? Link people, results, plans, and processes. Build pride through results and accountability around department goals, so that employees can see their impact. Live the Criteria more than you talk about them. Explain to frontline staff members, including physicians, that the Baldrige journey is really about making their work easier, about getting better care to their patients, better products to their customers, and better learning for their students. How do you encourage engagement by your leadership team in continuous improvement and the Baldrige Criteria? Encourage personal commitment in a continuous improvement culture; orient new board members, leaders to such a culture. Embed the Baldrige Criteria framework as a management tool. Explain the specifics of the journey to physicians and others who may prefer a big-picture approach. Attend Baldrige break-out sessions, conferences, and training at state, regional, and national levels. Onboard senior leaders by giving them an overview of your continuous improvement journey and letting them know that the organization is serious about accountability. Make some quality approaches nonnegotiable. Hire for people that share the organization’s values. How do you win over naysayers to the Baldrige process? Point out the results achieved over time. Look at ways to overcome barriers as a team. Help people understand where they fit in, how processes work. They want to continue to learn, to continue to improve, but they need to know how they can have impact. Take the time to understand how various elements of Baldrige feedback reports received really do relate to the organization’s overall mission. For example, a Pewaukee senior leader said the district received a comment on tracking on-time school buses; at first glance, this comment did not appear to relate to learning and was dismissed. However, folks soon realized that students who were late were missing valuable learning time. How would you answer these questions?