How do you measure a CEO’s impact? In November 2014, Harvard Business Review (HBR) ranked CEOs according to "increases their companies have seen in total shareholder return and market capitalization." Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com earned the top ranking. But as Charles Fombrun points out in an HBR blog, "Companies now need to understand what value they are creating, not only for their investors, but also for their employees, customers, and society at large." When HBR asked Reputation Institute to create a broader measure of CEO performance, it came up with a performance index that included a score for each company’s workplace, citizenship, and governance. Reputation Institute then re-rated the CEOs using a combined ranking. The results? "Companies that deliver strong financial results do not always have good reputations with the public, and vice versa." Amazon.com’s CEO fell two places in the ranking, to number 3. The biggest changes in ranking were for Monsanto, which fell 74 places, and Volkswagen, which rose 68 places. Fombrun says, "The fact that financial performance and non-financial performance reputation do not correlate among HBR’s top 100 CEOs underscores why it is so important to keep refining our non-financial metrics and ensuring their rigor. . . . A great CEO’s legacy is never as one-dimensional as the ledger." How do you come up with and refine your own set of nonfinancial and financial metrics? The Baldrige Excellence Framework and its Criteria for Performance Excellence focus you on just this composite of metrics: product and process, customer, workforce, and leadership and governance results, as well as financial and market results. Said Ken Schiller, co-owner of Baldrige Award recipient K&N Management, "Personally, I measure [success] by, are we achieving excellence? . . . But I don’t focus primarily on profitability or growth. I focus on, are we achieving excellence? And the means we use to do that is delighting every guest that walks in our door." In addition, "I consider my most important job as an owner is to create an environment that attracts A-players and then to recruit them, select them, and make sure that they stay." This attention to a broad set of measures doesn’t mean that K&N’s financial results have suffered: in the years before receiving the award, K&N’s restaurants significantly outperformed local competitors and national chains in sales. They also topped the industry standard for profit. For additional examples of organizations that track a composite of results, see the profiles of Baldrige Award recipients Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, MESA, and PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice, among others. And see the Baldrige Excellence Framework booklet or the Baldrige Excellence Builder for key questions that will help you decide what metrics you should be tracking.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In the steel industry, heavy machinery, hazardous energies, falls, heat stress, and noise and hearing issues are common dangers; unfortunately, safety incidents are also all too common. Luckily for their employees, some steel businesses see workforce safety as their first and foremost priority. Baldrige Award recipient PRO-TEC Coating Company processes steel, including advanced high-strength grades, to help automakers build cars that are lighter and safer. It also focuses on safety as its number-one priority. This was made evident in the recent launch of a new facility that included the small business increasing its workforce by 33% and its product capacity by 50%. With all of these increases, how did PRO-TEC continue to ensure the safety of its workforce? At the upcoming Quest for Excellence® conference, Eric Franks, PRO-TEC’s manager of technology and quality assurance, will talk about "Addressing Workforce Challenges To Launch Our New Facility." And the insights he will present in regards to safety at PRO-TEC are impressive. According to Franks, On December 29, 2014, we marked ten years since our last lost work day (>5.4 million man-hours and still ongoing). We finished 2014 with zero Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordables (still ongoing). Our contractors working on-site have gone the last two years without an OSHA recordable (still ongoing). Franks offers three tips in regards to safety: As safety is our number-one priority, don’t lose sight of what is most important, and never miss an opportunity to reinforce the message. Hire for attitude first, then aptitude (we’ve used behavioral-based interviewing since the beginning in 1992). Align expectations to allow Associates to know what is expected of them, how to measure and improve their work, why it’s important, and how it aligns with organizational goals. PRO-TEC, which won the Baldrige Award in 2007, continues to use the Baldrige Excellence Framework as a reference for continuous improvement, and other small businesses, as well as organizations across all industries, can apply lessons learned. For example, Franks says that by performing a self-assessment using the Baldrige framework, an organization can begin to understand at a holistic level what may be an appropriate balance in order to establish priorities to make the best use of its limited resources. In addition, there is great value in  Leadership Team members filling out the Organizational Profile to end up with a common understanding of the environment, relationships, competitive environment, strategic context, and performance improvement system(s) for the organization. He adds, having seen the benefits of the first two steps, an organization should take advantage of the Baldrige-based Alliance for Performance Excellence state/regional program in its area for an award application and the feedback that will follow. To learn from this and other sessions featuring role-model Baldrige Award recipients sharing best practices, register for the Quest for Excellence, April 12-15, in Baltimore, MD.

Posted by Christine Schaefer The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has long demonstrated an organizational culture based on strong customer service. It received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award twice. And it has also earned hotel industry recognition for top customer satisfaction. So when an organization wants to learn how to build and sustain a culture with a strong customer focus and results reflecting service excellence, The Ritz-Carlton is a good source of best practices. To learn about and share such practices, I recently talked to Jamey Lutz, area performance improvement manager for The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Lutz was director of quality at a Ritz property in Florida when the company received its second Baldrige Award in 1999. In that position, Lutz supervised all property-related quality and customer service initiatives. He also directed hotel training and preparation in advance of the company’s selection as a Baldrige Award recipient that year. As Lutz explained, The Ritz-Carlton culture is built on a framework of high standards that were established from the company’s outset. "All of our success was built on a very simple framework—the Gold Standards. The Gold Standards encompass The Ritz-Carlton motto ("Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen"); three essential service steps (give a warm welcome, anticipate guest needs, and provide a fond farewell); a credo statement outlining the hotel’s commitment to its guests; and the Employee Promise, a statement expressing the hotel’s commitment to its employees. Twelve Service Values constitute a final component of the Gold Standards. Those values are conveyed in statements such as "I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life" and "I own and immediately resolve guest problems." Lutz stressed that the Gold Standards have continually been "reinforced and enlivened in the company." The company reinforces them through such frequent and regular events as daily 15- to 20-minute hotel line-ups consisting of all Ritz-Carlton employees around the world. At each of these line-ups, Lutz explained, in addition to discussing logistical issues, the employees review one of the Service Values and "enliven" other components of the Gold Standards through discussion and role playing. Other practices for reinforcing the company’s core values and standards include mandating that the Credo Card be included as part of employee uniforms. The Ritz-Carlton Credo Card is part of employees’ uniform. Image used with permission of the Ritz-Carlton. "We can never allow our core values to be compromised. They are the basics outlining what we stand for," said Lutz. "If you don’t have the basics down—those minimum standards that you are continuously striving to perfect, you’re never going to realize the long-term goals and aspirations of your company." Lutz shared the following tips for other organizations to build and sustain a culture of excellent customer service: 1. Shoot for the heart: Lutz explained that The Ritz-Carlton prioritizes the selection and recruitment of "world-class ladies and gentlemen" (in keeping with its motto). "You can teach someone the technical skills for a position or a role, but you can’t train them to have a sincere, caring attitude for others. Particularly for customer-facing roles and frontline positions, we’re looking for someone with a service mentality. "If you don’t have that genuine desire to serve, it’s not going to come across as authentic, and our guests will know it." 2. Train and develop employees to be able to sustain high standards for service: For example, the company provides extensive training around the three steps of service outlined in the Gold Standards, said Lutz. 3. Implement rewards and recognition programs for employees to sustain the expected performance in relation to service components: Lutz advises building rewards and recognition components to address the types of customer service behaviors that your organization seeks to have your employees demonstrate. If a Ritz-Carlton employee is observed doing something well, he or she can receive a First-Class Card as a form of kudos and recognition. Such cards also give employees opportunities to win perks such as a free dinner or movie ticket through regular drawings. At a higher level, The Ritz-Carlton’s "Five Star" award program provides sizeable cash rewards for those who demonstrate internal or external service excellence on multiple occasions. 4. Use the Baldrige Excellence Framework for ongoing improvement: Beyond the basic cultural framework provided by the Gold Standards, the Baldrige Excellence Framework "gives us a blueprint for ongoing success," said Lutz. "Baldrige provides a framework to get to a higher level of organizational performance." He affirmed that the benefit of using the Baldrige framework is more fundamental than being recognized for winning the prestigious national award. A key benefit is that an organization "establishes a baseline of where you are as a company," he said. He added that the feedback that The Ritz-Carlton got the first time it applied for the Baldrige Award was essential to building its understanding of its performance. Lutz also offered the insight that an organization’s quest to build a culture of excellence in customer service is "a marathon, not a sprint." "You can’t build a world-class culture overnight," said Lutz. "It has to be built and reinforced from the highest levels of the organization. It’s an ongoing, unrelenting commitment to excellence, and it never ends." Lutz will deliver a presentation on building and sustaining a customer-focused culture at the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® conference. To learn from this and other sessions featuring role-model Baldrige Award recipients sharing best practices, register for the Quest for Excellence, April 12-15, in Baltimore, MD.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey A new year brings with it an opportunity to be grateful for your many blessings. At the Baldrige Program, one of our blessings has to be the engaged community of Baldrige practitioners—folks who have served as examiners at all levels, across the country; who not only understand but have often mastered how to use the Baldrige Excellence Framework, which includes the Criteria for Performance Excellence; and who share a spirit of giving back to help others improve and, so doing, help the nation. Not too long ago, I came across an online post by Baldrige alumnus examiner Suresh Nirody, assistant vice president supply chain for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He shared a novel way to use the Baldrige Criteria for personal development—as a tool for a job search. His idea is to use the Organizational Profile, the preface of the Criteria, to ground yourself in the organization to which you are applying for a job. The Organizational Profile is intended to be used to create an overview of an organization, from its environment and relationships to its competitive position, strategic context, and performance improvement system. By answering the questions contained in the Organization Profile, one can figure out the key factors that are of the greatest importance to the organization—what makes that potential employer tick. Says Nirody, "When researching a particular company that you have targeted as a possible future employer, the Baldrige Organization Profile provides an excellent framework to use. Research the company and look for answers to the questions in the profile! This will stand you in good stead." He explains, "First, it will help you develop a better understanding of the company; can clarify for you if you really want to work for that company; and can help you determine if you might be a good fit. Second it can provide you information that you can use in the interview process to show that you understand various aspects of the company, such as its challenges. And third, you can use the framework to help you formulate consequential questions, so that when the interviewer asks you for your questions you ask about critical-to-success items such as core competencies or strategic challenges, etc." What tips do you have for ways to use the Baldrige Framework and Criteria?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon There have been many studies and articles over the years about characteristics of successful CEO’s. I tried to summarize some of these characteristics, with a Baldrige spin, in 2013 with A Sense of Comity. Certainly, key characteristics include setting a vision, communicating and listening, and building trust. A topic that I have not seen discussed over the years is what executives value in their most senior leader. That topic has recently been explored in a survey of more than 1,750 executives in 19 markets worldwide and was summarized in an HBR blog by Leslie Gaines-Ross.  There were three characteristics that were valued most highly. I’ll start with numbers two and three. They are visibility and persuasiveness. 81% of global executives believed that their CEO’s had to have a visible public profile for their company to be highly regarded.  Furthermore, the CEO must convey the company’s story in a convincing manner in both traditional communication vehicles and in digital social media. The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence started emphasizing this latter vehicle for CEO communication in 2013. The number one attribute that executives value in their CEO is humility. And only one out of four CEO’s in the study were described as humble by their executives. However, the study found that highly regarded CEO’s were six times as likely to be described as humble than their less highly regarded peers. Why is such value placed on humility? Because humble leaders are believed to demonstrate many of the other important leadership attributes: motivating and empowering employees, developing shared values, and listening well. They build a supportive organizational culture. These characteristics of humble CEO’s are supported by a recent article in the Financial Post (Canada). It quotes a study of 63 companies by Yi Amy Ou, an assistant professor at National University of Singapore’s business school. She reported that organizations led by humble CEO’s increased engagement and improved performance throughout the organization. Some additional data on the benefits of a humble CEO from the article: Ego is the culprit of over one-third of all failed business decisions. More than half of businesspeople estimate that egos cost firms between 6 and 15% of their revenues. According to Jim Collins, great leaders possess a rare combination of humility and perseverance. The Baldrige Quest for Excellence conference on April 12-15, 2015 provides an opportunity to hear from and interact with some role model CEO’s, including the four 2014 Baldrige award winners and Katherine Gottlieb from Southcentral Foundation, who will be recognized for her visionary leadership and will be delivering a keynote presentation. Whether you can join us or not, how is your organization doing on the "H" word?

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Why the American Hospital Association (AHA) believes that using the Baldrige Health Care Criteria can help hospitals get better faster was explained recently in an audio podcast by Gene O’Dell, vice president for strategic planning and performance excellence for AHA. "From a hospital perspective, using the Baldrige model can help you achieve better patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes that are aligned with patient requirements, workforce satisfaction, . . . greater efficiencies and operational performance, and improved execution of your strategies," said O’Dell. AHA, which is a sponsor of the 2015-2016 Baldrige Excellence Framework (Health Care), sees the Baldrige sponsorship in alignment with its own performance excellence journey, Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence Initiative, and strategic plan, including strategies to reduce cost and improve care and population health. As a framework sponsor, AHA provided a digital copy of the framework to all of its members and encourages its use for improvement. "Baldrige is the overall organizing framework that can identify where there are problems," said O’Dell. "Think of Baldrige like a map that will show the organization where . . . Six Sigma, Lean, and other tools should be deployed. . . . If an organization deploys [such tools] without an overall map as Baldrige, it would be like taking a trip in a car but not having a map to know the way." According to O’Dell, organizations—no matter their size or the type of services they offer—can use the Baldrige framework to answer three simple questions: Is your organization doing as well as it could? How do you know? What should your organization improve or change? "Baldrige helps you to integrate the organization to better align a patient’s requirements with the systems that will deliver what patients want and ensure those are linked to clinical outcomes," he said. "Baldrige helps focus you on the core values, giving you a systems perspective that is process dependent, not people dependent; visionary leadership, with leaders focused on the future and changing the business model not just running the business. But [the Baldrige framework] has a patient-focused excellence component, too, delivering ever-improving, high-quality health care to patients. And it also really values people. An engaged workforce that finds personal meaning and motivation in their work, and when they receive positive interpersonal and workplace support this really improves the entire organization." Added O’Dell, "When you speak with Baldrige Award winners, while they’re honored to have received the award, the real reward is how the process has improved and continues to improve their organizations. . . . Because, you see, pursuing performance improvement is not a destination, it’s but a journey, and more importantly you don’t have to apply for an award to get started in evaluating your organization and identifying areas for improvement."

Posted by Christine Schaefer Every year a new cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows gains intensive knowledge about leading organizations to excellence through cross-sector, peer-to-peer learning hosted at the sites of Baldrige Award recipients. The following interview with Rand Jerris, Ph.D., highlights how a recent Baldrige Fellow applied learning from the leadership-development program to bolster the performance measurement practices of his own organization. Jerris is the senior managing director of public services for the United States Golf Association. 1. Tell us about your organization’s work and your leadership role. Created in 1894, the United States Golf Association (USGA) is the governing body for golf in the United States and Mexico. Together with The R&A in St. Andrews, Scotland, we write and interpret the Rules of Golf for golfers around the world, including rules of play, equipment standards, and a code of amateur status. The USGA also maintains a handicap and course rating system that makes the game fair and enjoyable for golfers of differing abilities. The association has also developed strategic goals of making golf more sustainable environmentally and economically, as well as making it more welcoming to a wider, more diverse population of participants and fans. Our most visible activities are our 14 national championships, including the U.S. Open, U.S. Women’s Open, and U.S. Senior Open Championships, as well as the recently announced U.S. Senior Women’s Open, which will launch in 2018. First contested in 1895, the U.S. Open is among the premier events in golf; it is also the economic engine that fuels our investment in the game, generating well over half of our $200 million in annual revenue. With such resources, we are able to support substantive programs that advance the game’s economic and environmental sustainability, as well as programs that make golf welcoming for all audiences. We’re proud to have invested more than $1 billion in the game over the past 12 years. In my role as senior managing director of public services, I oversee the association’s sustainability and community programs, as well as the USGA Museum (the oldest sports museum in the United States). USGA Museum and Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History at the USGA headquarters in Far Hills, NJ. Image used with permission; copyright USGA/John Mummert. I spend a majority of my time engaged in strategic and operational planning. For the past three years, I’ve led our efforts to improve organizational effectiveness and to create a culture of continuous improvement. While we’re unlikely to pursue a national Baldrige Award anytime soon, we have found that the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide an outstanding framework for elevating our performance. 2. Would you please describe your journey to date toward organizational improvement? Together with the members of our leadership team, I am thrilled with all that we have accomplished over the past three years. While we had existed for more than 116 years, we had never had a formal strategic plan until 2012 (substantively revised in 2014). Since starting our journey in 2012, we’ve also aligned our team behind a renewed mission statement. We’ve articulated our core values for the first time, with active participation by more than 200 members of our staff. We’ve identified, with clarity and purpose, our key customers and initiated key customer feedback mechanisms for all core programs. Last fall, we gathered every member of our staff from around the country for the first time and staged an all-staff retreat to build alignment around our strategic plan, our values (Lead, Serve, Inspire) and a new brand vision. We also conducted our first-ever employee engagement survey. It’s been quite a ride—and the results have been dramatic (and measurable!). Most recently, we created and introduced a scorecard of organizational measures for the first time. This has been a transformational process. When we started our journey three years ago with the help of Bo McBee (former chair of the Judges Panel of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award), it’s fair to say that the organization was focused on activities, rather than results. In those first days of working with Bo, we conducted interviews with departmental leaders across the USGA. A few of the questions focused on outcomes and measures (e.g., Are you having a good year? How do you know? What metrics do you use to evaluate your progress?). The response most frequently given went something like this: "We don’t have measures; we’re not a corporation." In our mission-driven culture focused on service to the game, the very notion of metrics and measurement was foreign. Yet we intuitively understood that any organization—for-profit or not-for-profit—could benefit from a clearly articulated set of measures that reflected our strategic priorities. 3. How did you identify the most relevant and reliable measures of your organization’s performance for the scorecard you’ve developed? The organizational scorecard that we developed is structured around the four core pillars of our strategic plan: Championships, Governance, Health of the Game, and Community. Our Championships pillar centers on the concept of inspiration—how can we elevate our championships to inspire present and future golfers, as well as golf fans around the world? The Governance pillar speaks to the integrity of the game and reflects one of our foundational purposes—to ensure that the game is fair for all who play, and that skill, not technology, determines success on the golf course. The Health of the Game pillar speaks to the sustainability of golf, in particular, to the economic and environmental viability of golf courses. Finally, our Community pillar guides our efforts to foster a game that is accessible and welcoming to all who wish to play. A fifth section of our scorecard speaks to the effectiveness of our operational activities ("support functions," in USGA parlance). In considering the metrics that would be most meaningful to our staff and most effective in capturing our desired outcomes, we found it helpful to think about various categories of measurements: metrics that speak to the reach of our programs; metrics that reflect customer satisfaction; metrics that capture engagement with our programs, and as such are reflections of the quality of our programs; metrics that reflect the effectiveness of our products and standards; and metrics that reflect the brand of our programs, which we view as essential to their sustainability. 4. What are some of the key indicators that you chose? Reach metrics are common within our Championships strategy; for example, these measure the size of the television audience for the U.S. Open (measured in gross ratings points) and the number of users engaged with the digital products that surround our championships (unique visitors to USOPEN.com, as well as the "Championships" tab of USGA.org). Customer satisfaction scores are also critical for our championships because we want to ensure that the best players in the world have the best experiences when they compete in a USGA championship—it’s essential to our efforts to attract the strongest fields. Finally, because significant percentages of annual revenue derive from ticket sales and corporate hospitality sales, we measure customer satisfaction for key spectator audiences at each of our championships. Engagement metrics speak to the adoption rates of our programs. Within our Governance strategy, for example, we need to know that golfers—from beginners to experts—are engaging with Rules education content. Another key initiative is the international growth of a single handicap and course rating system, so that a golfer from Australia can play a golfer from Austria and a golfer from Argentina and have a fair and fun match. For this to happen, the golf courses in each of these nations must have a course rating that is determined with a consistent and accurate formula. So we’ll measure the number of golf courses worldwide that have a formal USGA course rating. Among our engagement metrics, none may be more significant than measuring the percentage of golf courses that have reduced maintained and irrigated acreage. As we look out 25 to 50 years at the future of golf, the USGA believes that the most significant threat to the game is water—the cost of water, access to water, and the availability of water. In some regions of the country (southern California being the prime example), water issues are so extreme today that golf courses are being shuttered. Having studied the issue and the various mitigation strategies, we believe that there is one lever that has more impact than any other: reducing the amount of land we irrigate as an industry. To this end, we are elevating awareness of the issue aggressively, and we need to understand how individual golf facilities are responding. An illustrative example of an effectiveness measure can be found in the governance section of our scorecard: the average correlation coefficient of skill factors on the PGA Tour. As noted above, one of our fundamental responsibilities in setting and maintaining golf equipment performance standards—an important component of USGA Rules—is to ensure that technology never replaces skill as the primary determinant of success in the game. In other words, we don’t want you to be able to buy a better score. To this end, we invest more than $5 million annually through the work of the USGA Research and Test Center to test golf equipment for conformance to established standards (e.g., clubhead size and length; the coefficient of restitution for clubface materials; the size, weight, and initial velocity of golf balls; etc.). Mechanical golfer inside the USGA Research and Test Center at the USGA Headquarters. Image used with permission; copyright USGA/Matt Rainey. To confirm that these standards are effective and to understand if new materials or designs are providing unfair advantages, we measure the correlation between discrete skills (driving distance, driving accuracy, greens in regulation, average puts per hole, etc.) and overall performance on the PGA Tour—the world’s premier league and the stage on which the world’s most skilled players appear (measured by position of finish). Elevating this metric to the organizational scorecard ensures that we keep a close watch on this correlation. Finally, we have brand metrics, which speak to the relevancy of our organization and its programs. While we are recognized as the "governing body" for golf, the truth is that we hold no legal authority. Golfers choose to play by USGA Rules and choose to play with conforming equipment only because they respect the game and they respect the USGA. For us to be effective, we need to know that we are relevant to golfers—and we believe that the best measures of relevancy are brand metrics. 5. What was the hardest part of this undertaking, and what resources or learning were you able to leverage to overcome challenges? Of the many opportunities that we first identified to improve organizational performance, the one that we feared could cause the most disruption was the introduction of organizational measures. It was clear that some within the organization viewed the adoption of measures as another step toward the "corporatization" of the USGA in which we would progress from being a nonprofit organization driven solely by the good of the game to become a for-profit entity focused purely on the bottom line. There were also those who feared that the introduction of metrics would jeopardize individual job security. From such sentiments, we understood that cultural evolution—building an environment of trust across the organization—would be critical for the success of these efforts. The formal path toward creating an organizational scorecard began with a capstone project that I completed as a Baldrige Fellow in 2013-2014—an invaluable program enhanced by the involvement of Harry Hertz (Baldrige director emeritus) and Bob Fangmeyer (Baldrige director); the talented facilitation of Pat Hilton of the Baldrige staff; and the contributions of Bob L. Barnett as executive in residence. [Editor’s note: As a former member of the Baldrige Program’s Board of Overseers, Barnett played a key role in establishing the Baldrige Fellows program.] Through the Fellows program, I was first exposed to the power of organizational metrics. I would never have imagined that Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control (2012 Baldrige Award recipient in manufacturing) or Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital (2010 Baldrige Award recipient in health care) could have much relevance to the USGA, but exposure to their measurement-driven cultures opened my eyes to the power of metrics. The success of Lockheed Martin demonstrated clearly how metrics could be aligned from the organizational level to the individual level to drive both continuous improvement and results. From Advocate Good Samaritan, we learned that a system that advocates complete transparency around metrics to all key customers (patients, their families, their doctors, and all employees) can create a powerful alignment of customer satisfaction and employee engagement that, literally, saves lives. 6. After your organization’s senior leadership team approved a final set of measures for the scorecard, how was the tool introduced and rolled out to the workforce? To improve internal communications, foster greater alignment across the organization, and ultimately impact employee engagement, our executive director, Mike Davis, introduced a quarterly calendar of "town hall meetings" when he assumed his responsibilities in early 2011. We leverage these town halls to communicate important news about the organization, to solicit questions and feedback from the staff, and to advance initiatives for organizational improvement. One particular theme has been incorporated into every meeting for the past three years: our strategic plan. It is also our intention to elevate discussion of our core values at every town hall following their introduction last December. It was only appropriate, then, that the formal introduction of the scorecard occurred at our most recent town hall in mid-February (where we also discussed the results of our first employee engagement survey). A member of our staff (but not a member of our leadership team) introduced the scorecard, discussing its structure, demonstrating specific measures, and explaining its purpose for driving organizational improvement. At the end of the meeting, a hard copy of the scorecard, including 2014 baselines, was distributed to every member of the staff; the scorecard also has been posted to our employee intranet site. The first revision of the scorecard, incorporating data through February 28 (the close of our first quarter), was posted to the intranet on March 16. Naturally, the scorecard has also been shared with our board, which will use it to evaluate the annual performance of the leadership team moving forward. 7. How does your organization collect and report relevant results? As noted above, we initially thought that our greatest challenge might come from employee resistance to measurement. Thus far, this has not proven to be the case—the great majority of staff members are excited and eager to engage. Rather, the greatest challenge has proven to be the time and effort required to build a system that supports the aggregation and reporting of data on a regular basis. As a small (300 employees) nonprofit organization, we do not have a centralized technology platform (e.g., a customer relationship management database) that supports the centralization of data for our key activities. Our solution—perhaps temporary—is manual and simple: an extensive Excel spreadsheet that sits behind a single-page report. We realized quickly that the maintenance of the scorecard (and associated Excel spreadsheet) would require considerable effort. To support this work, we restructured the responsibilities of a member of our staff (manager level), and that person is now held accountable for working with individual department leaders or their team members who have been assigned ownership for reporting individual metrics. This latter point should not be taken lightly: We have come to understand that each metric needs to be assigned an owner, and that each owner has individual accountability for ensuring that the system or tool is in place to collect the necessary data and ensuring that the data is being reported. For example, one of our organizational priorities is to drive greater diversity and inclusion in golf. To this end, we are seeking to understand the penetration of our core programs to diverse audiences, in particular, women and persons of color. As we do so, we recognize that we need to start the actual collection of information on gender and ethnicity, so we realize that we need to introduce relevant questions into championship entry forms, volunteer and committee biographical forms, program registration forms and systems, etc. It’s one thing to say you are going to measure diversity and inclusion in core programs, but it’s a far more complicated process to ensure that the data are actually being collected, aggregated, reported—and, we hope, used to drive improvement. Finally, for the scorecard to be effective as we roll it out, there is also the need for baseline data. Once we had identified the relevant metrics, assigned ownership, and confirmed the processes for collecting and reporting data, we made an effort to identify relevant 2014 baselines. In some cases, this required staff members to revisit 2014 records and documents to reconstruct data, but the effort has proven worthwhile. In the end, the scorecard contains only five metrics for which a 2014 baseline could not be established, but more than 30 where baselines could be identified. 8. How do you see the scorecard evolving in the future? As work on the scorecard proceeded, one of the primary challenges was to build alignment across the leadership team as to the metrics that matter most. Based on my conversations with colleagues in other organizations and other industries who had embarked on similar efforts, I learned quickly that this was no cause for concern. Indeed, everyone I spoke to about the process assured me that selecting the best metrics is the hardest part of the project. But I also learned another important lesson that I shared over and over with my colleagues on our leadership team, that is, that it’s far more important to get started with good metrics than to wait to identify the perfect metrics. In fact, I learned that you cannot truly understand what the perfect metrics might be until you get started. The key is to identify measures that you think are appropriate and then be willing and open to refining once you start to use the results and understand how they are impacting the operation. In and of itself, the process of selecting metrics is a process that can and should be subject to continuous improvement. So as we move forward, I fully expect that continuous assessment and refinement of our metrics will occur. As we get underway, I also have my eye on identifying relevant external benchmarks. While it is one thing to have the ability to compare the performance of the U.S. Open against the Women’s Open, it would be another to be able to benchmark the U.S. Open against other elite tournaments in golf or, even better, against the very best championships in all sports. Unfortunately, the golf industry does not yet have a culture of transparency, so it is hard to find relevant industry data. But we’re committed not to let this prevent us from trying. One of our objectives for the near future is to initiate an industry-wide dialogue about improving the game and bringer greater value to golfers. And we’re going to suggest that the sharing of data across the industry might be a powerful way to drive change for our industry.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey A shepherd is a person who tends, herds, feeds, or guards herds of sheep. Because sheep eat grass, clover, and other pasture plants, they can’t stay stagnate in one pasture for too long. The environment changes, and to maintain their health and productivity, the sheep must move from pasture to pasture; thus the importance of the shepherd-keep the flock intact, protect it from predators, and guide it to new horizons so that it can continue to grow. But does the shepherd lead the flock from the front or the back? Obviously, shepherds have been "leading from the back" for more than 5,000 years (talk about opportunities for cycles of improvement), in one of the oldest professions known to man. Shepherds guide the flock, allowing individuals or small groups to go here and there, testing new ground or new spots to feed, but all moving in the same direction. So, why am I writing about it here? Because in an upcoming Quest for Excellence® presentation, Kevin Unger, PhD, FACHE, president and CEO, Poudre Valley Hospital and Medical Center of the Rockies of University of Colorado Health (formerly Poudre Valley Health System), will be discussing senior leaders’ roles in decreasing costs and improving outcomes while leading from the back. According to Unger, there is great value for senior leaders to take a shepherding role-guiding their workforce, actively participating in improvement, and involving all senior leaders (including physicians) but giving the workforce opportunities to take initiative. For example, "Senior leaders create a focus on action through their active involvement in improvement team initiatives, but the involvement does not mean solving the problems for the teams," said Unger. He adds, no improvement methodology can be successful if it is not consistently applied-or supported by senior leadership, and front-line staff can problem-solve. "The visibility of senior leaders is necessary for engaging the workforce in performance improvements," he said. Senior leadership, including physician leadership, need to be engaged for successful improvements to take place. His presentation goal is to give audience members (and especially senior leaders) practical ideas on how to become more involved with improvement initiatives without undermining the work of improvement teams. Specifically, he will focus on what senior leaders can do to be actively engaged in both decreasing costs and improving clinical outcomes. Unger says that Poudre Valley Hospital and Medical Center of the Rockies learned from its Baldrige journey (it received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2008) the importance of continuous improvement. According to Unger, using the Baldrige Excellence Framework (1) assists in identifying areas where your organization can focus improvement initiatives, (2) provides a structured framework for making system improvements and creating focus, and (3) is a disciplined approach for identifying areas of strengths to build upon. To learn from this and other sessions featuring role-model Baldrige Award recipients sharing best practices, register for the Quest for Excellence, April 12-15, in Baltimore, MD.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Think you need gifted people in your organization to succeed? Or that sheer hard work is bound to deliver your desired results? Either way, think again. Geoff Colvin, Fortune magazine senior editor-at-large and author of Talented Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, makes the case that innate talent is not what’s behind the greatest performances in multiple fields of human endeavor. At the same time, he finds that the work it takes to achieve the best performance must reflect a few critical elements and principles. The good news Colvin conveys is that individuals and organizations alike can achieve high performance through the developmental approach he calls deliberate practice. I recently interviewed him to learn more about his insights on great performance and his keynote presentation at the Baldrige Program’s upcoming Quest for Excellence® conference. Following is the interview. Geoff Colvin; image used with permission During your Quest for Excellence presentation, will you explain how organizations can improve and excel through such practice? Yes. First I’ll tell you why I think this is so important and why I strongly believe that it’s more important than it used to be for organizations to do this. A trend that has accelerated greatly since I was writing Talented Is Overrated is that standards are rising in any competitive field. And the vast majority of the organizations that we all deal with are in competitive fields, even if they’re nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits are still trying to fulfill a mission, and there are forces out there that may well be trying to fulfill that mission better than they do. They may be motivated entirely by humanitarian goals, but they’re still going to have to get better if they want to fulfill their mission. Of course, in profit-making businesses, competition has been a fact of life forever, but it’s getting more intense. There are a few reasons for this. One is that customers and competitors increasingly have more information and are better able to communicate with one another. What that means essentially is that information costs, transaction costs, and switching costs are dropping essentially to zero. This is what Bill Gates long ago called a friction-free economy, which is a wonderful thing—it’s extremely efficient—but the reality is that lots of organizations actually relied on friction: Life was a little easier for them because customers didn’t know they could get a better deal someplace else. Or even if they knew, it was too hard to make the switch; the transactions were expensive so they didn’t make the switch. In the Baldrige Program, we work with organizations in the health care and education sectors too that have had to address new challenges as customers and other stakeholders come to them with much information that’s available online these days. I get precisely the same response when I talk about these things to many different groups. Recently I was talking to a group that was overwhelmingly business people; one member of the audience came up to me afterward and said he was a staff member on a congressional committee. And he said, "Everything that you’re talking about applies to us in government." And people from universities have come up to me to say that everything that I was talking about applies to them as well. So in all sectors of the economy, you’re seeing organizations facing more complex challenges in their operating environments today? Right. That’s really it. We’re all facing these new challenges. To respond effectively—to remain effective organizations—we all have to get better. Depending on the kind of business that you’re in and the kind of organization you are, you may be facing pressures from around the world, even in health care. We all use the phrase world-class pretty loosely, but the truth is that there is international competition in a great number of sectors today. So we actually have to be world-class. We have to figure out how to get significantly better in ways that we didn’t have to do before. Everyone wants to get better—that’s all very nice. But the truth is, we have to get better in this more open, friction-free environment. We have to get better if we’re going to stay in the game. So that’s why it’s important to understand this question of where great performance really comes from. Whether it’s for individuals or organizations, the basic principles are the same. You’ve written that a lot of organizations are not good in the area of developing employees for high performance. Would you please elaborate on that? Sure. In general, most companies just don’t do a very good job of what a lot of them call leadership development. Whatever you call it, they don’t do a very good job of developing employees. They want everybody to do their job well, and they figure they’ll just observe who does their job well and then give them bigger jobs. What I see happening in recent years is that a lot of companies are realizing that isn’t enough. They realize they need a good strong program of developing employees. They look to the handful of companies that have taken this seriously for a long time. And they’re all getting with the program now and trying to catch up. That’s in general. The specific issue is that the principles of deliberate practice that I talk about in the book seem to be completely forgotten at most organizations. When I say forgotten, I mean everybody sort of knows them: everybody understands when they’re watching a sports team or listening to a great musician how those people got so good—through the principles of deliberate practice. Yet when they get to work, they don’t apply those principles to individuals or to the organization. What I’m going to argue in my presentation is that the organizations that do apply those principles perform much, much better. The same principles apply to performance of individuals and organizations, and I’ll give examples of each. Why do you think that organizations are short-sighted in this area or just aren’t making the effort? In my experience, it’s because they feel they can’t afford to have people not performing. Deliberate practice is an activity separate from the actual performance of the work. There are ways to practice in the work, but real deliberate practice is an activity separate from the work. Again, when you look at sports and music, that’s obvious. Musicians may spend 95 percent of their time practicing and 5 percent performing; for an NFL football player it’s a similar ratio: 95 percent of his time practicing, 5 percent actually performing the activity that he gets paid for. But in business, we all feel that we can’t take time off from actually doing our work in order to practice for doing our work better. So most companies don’t do it. The best ones realize that it isn’t an expense when you do that; it’s an investment. And it pays off. A leap of faith is required the first time you start down that road. Even though you may be convinced, you don’t know for sure that it’s actually going to pay off. So a lot of managers just feel they can’t afford it. The best ones understand they not only can afford it, but they really have to do it. You’ve written that you’ve been surprised by strong interest in your book by some groups of people you assumed would already be aware of how best to improve their performance. Would you please give some examples? Sure. At the individual level, I got a call from the manager of the bookstore at the Juilliard School in New York to come in and sign copies of the book. I said, "Sure," but I thought, "If there’s one group of people in the world who do not need this book, it’s the students at the Juilliard School—they got there because they understand deeply everything I talk about in the book." The manager later told me that it’s the bestselling title they’ve ever carried in that store. So that began to tell me that even the people who understand these principles the best are the ones who want to understand them even better. They want to know how great performance works and why. A different example but similar in some ways: I was asked to talk to an audience of one thousand brain surgeons. I thought, "These are the smartest people you can think of, and they do this incredibly difficult thing." So I was worried about how that would go. Well, they loved hearing about what it takes to improve performance. Afterward, those brain surgeons were lined up out the door for me to sign their books. I thought, "This is telling us something—that the people who presumably understand these things got as good as they are because they keep wanting to get better. That’s an interesting lesson." With regard to organizations, I’ve had a few experiences that I’ll tell about at the Quest conference. A medical products company decided to prepare for the introduction of a new product using the principles, taking employees away from selling in order to practice and prepare. This was a gamble. You take them out of the field and train them while they’re doing deliberate practice. The results were almost literally off the charts. I’ll explain that in detail in my presentation. For those organizations whose leaders say, "We don’t have the resources to really invest in our employees, especially to take them off the front line," how would you make the argument to invest in their workforce? I would hope that it wouldn’t be a tough sell. When you look at the companies that are famous for investing in their workforces, they tend to be great performers. One objection that I’ve encountered in companies is managers saying that in today’s environment, young people especially are just not going to stay with them for long. "I can train them, but I’m training them for my competitors," they say. But then they discover, "If I don’t offer the training, I won’t attract the best people in the first place." The other thing they discover is that a lot of those people will stay longer than they expected them to because they like what the place is doing for them. You’re still going to lose some good people. That’s inevitable. But you’re going to get better people and you’re going to keep them longer than if you didn’t offer the development. So I think it’s actually an easy sell. What are some other things that you’re focusing on now-and in your next book-that may help organizations improve their performance? The title of the new book is Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. It begins with the question, In a few years, what will people do better than computers? It turns out to be a very sobering question because the more you look into it, the more it looks like it’s going to be hard to find things that people do better than computers. Very intelligent people have said that artificial intelligence can threaten the existence of humanity. Even if you don’t think machines are going to rise up and kill all the humans, there are still mainstream people now who are thinking that for the first time in history, technology may actually eliminate some jobs faster than it creates new ones. So the question becomes, What will people do? What will be the high-value work, what will make organizations great and highly successful, and what will earn a rising living standard for people in a world where computers do more and more stuff—better, faster, cheaper than people can do that stuff? My answer is, Don’t look for the answer the way people have always done it, which is by asking, What is it that computers inherently can’t do? That won’t get us anywhere. Focus instead on what we as human beings are hard-wired to want to do with other people and get from other people—what is in our deepest nature that we want to do with one another and for one another? If we focus on that, then we’ll be doing stuff that will always have high value, which comes from our deepest and most essential human traits—developing empathy, working in groups, solving problems together, telling stories, building relationships. The best organizations now are focusing on exactly those things. We see empathy-development programs in particular at many organizations. The research on what makes groups effective—what makes teams effective—shows that it’s all about social sensitivity. It has little to do with the IQ of the team members. It really is important for organizations to understand this in order to perform better. To hear Colvin’s keynote presentation at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference on Wednesday, April 15, in Baltimore, MD, register for the conference now.

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon My sincere wish is that you will be the nozzle. But it sure is tempting to be the fire hose. Right now you are probably asking, what is Harry talking about? Has he gone off the deep end? Let me explain my concern, starting with the background. I recently read a blog post about the fire hose and the nozzle. The gist of the post was that in live and virtual communication we are too often the hose and too infrequently the nozzle. The "fire hose" person broadcasts everything that is on his or her mind. Like a fire hose, you are gushing everywhere and there is a lot of waste. The nozzle, on the other hand, is directed at exactly the place where water can do the most good. The same can be said for the focused communication of the "nozzle" person. She or he delivers the needed message with clarity and impact. We are just ten days away from the 27th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference. If you are at the conference, and I hope you will be, I can guarantee two outcomes. You will be energized by the systems of excellence that you hear about. And, you will come away with hundreds of ideas about how to improve your own organization. My question is will you be the fire hose or the nozzle when you return home? Sharing the energy and enthusiasm is great. Proposing hundreds of ideas is not. Take the time to digest and prioritize what improvements, innovations, or changes will have the greatest impact on your organization’s performance. Pick some low-hanging fruit, where results will be seen quickly. And then pick one or two bigger opportunities that will take longer, but will have significant potential impact on performance. Share those high priority ideas with the natural enthusiasm you will be bringing back from the conference. But please don’t restrict the fire hose analogy just to the Quest conference. Let me elaborate. I have a yard that takes several hours to mow on a garden tractor. It gives me lots of time to think. And thinking leads to ideas I like to share with my colleagues. I learned to share from the nozzle and not the hose. I realized this need to focus, when my colleagues starting asking me on Monday morning whether I had mowed. If I said yes, they either disappeared or had painful looks (maybe a little exaggeration here). Idea sharing, as with other organizational opportunities, needs prioritization. Too many ideas will be overwhelming and none will receive consideration. I hope to see you at the Quest conference! And please, leave the fire hose at home, when you return to your workplace!  

Posted by Dawn Marie Baldrige One of the Baldrige Program’s strategic advantages is its very engaged community. In fact, Baldrige not only depends on its dedicated volunteer workforce of examiners but on the community members that continue to support use of the Baldrige Excellence Framework and its Criteria by all organizations, big and small. This support stems from community members’ patriotism and sincere desire to help organizations in every sector succeed, from the schools that teach our children, the manufacturers that create the products we use everyday, the hospitals that care for our families, the service organizations that make our lives more pleasant, the small businesses that employ us, and the nonprofits that provide services in our own communities. To support the work of volunteers, the Baldrige Program has recently updated a set of PowerPoint files (slide set) and graphics that anyone may download free of charge and use in presentations, papers, etc. The 2015 slide set modules are Introduction to the Baldrige Program Introduction to the Baldrige Excellence Framework Baldrige Excellence Framework (Business/Nonprofit) Baldrige Excellence Framework (Education) Baldrige Excellence Framework (Health Care) The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Self-Assessing Your Organization with the Baldrige Excellence Framework Performance Excellence: A Systems Approach and Tools Baldrige Program Impacts Baldrige graphics free to download include Criteria overview frameworks for business/nonprofit, education, and health care; illustrations that depict learning and the maturation of processes; and a visual on the role of core values and concepts. Frequently asked questions related to Baldrige are also currently being updated. Thank you for the many ways that you use this slide set and graphics to spread word about the value of Baldrige.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Why is the Baldrige Excellence Framework beneficial for organizations in the education sector? "Education organizations are by nature complex systems," responds Lisa Muller, Jenks Public Schools Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning. "Watching the buses run every afternoon as they deliver thousands of students from our school sites to their homes is a great reminder for me of the importance of systems thinking and process management to our success as an organization." Since Muller’s suburban Oklahoma school district received a Baldrige Award in 2005, its enrollment has grown from 9,300 to 11,450 students. During the past decade, Jenks Public Schools also has seen its students become more diverse, both ethnically and socioeconomically. And examples abound of how the district continues to benefit from its knowledge and use of the Baldrige framework. Said Muller, "The continuous-improvement efforts at Jenks Public Schools have allowed us to identify ways to improve the effectiveness of our instructional programs and delivery methods, reduce operational costs so that more resources can be shifted to classrooms (even during the recent years of cuts in education funding), and recruit and retain effective employees." Muller shared that cost savings achieved during the construction process for capital improvement projects completed last year helped the district add (to the original building proposals) a field house for basketball, volleyball, and wrestling activities. Both the new and older district facilities today are used frequently beyond school hours for wide-ranging community education offerings, including tuition-based classes ranging from driver’s education to ballroom dancing. "Profits from these programs are reinvested in our schools and used to support additional educational opportunities for students," said Muller. To help other organizations benefit similarly from a Baldrige approach to organizational improvement, Muller shared the following guidance on getting started. 1. Start small and build on early successes over time: "My top tip for organizations at this stage and people leading continuous-improvement efforts is to recognize the slow nature of this type of organizational change," said Muller. "There’s a reason Baldrige Award recipients talk about their journey rather than their race." 2. Take advantage of all the self-assessment tools and informational resources on the Baldrige Program’s website: Muller noted that many (free and easy-to-use) resources for beginners are available on the "New to Baldrige" page of the Baldrige Program’s website at http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/enter/new.cfm/. For example, this web page has links to the "Are We Making Progress?" surveys and the easyInsight survey tool, which can help organizations identify potential starting points for their improvement work. 3. Focus conversations around continuous improvement rather than "doing Baldrige." The Baldrige Criteria provide an excellent framework for driving organizational improvement, said Muller, but they are a means to an end, not the end goal itself. Muller also recommended the Organizational Profile as a "very useful starting point" for organizations new to a Baldrige approach to performance improvement. "The questions in this part of the Baldrige Criteria help organizations do two things: (1) create context by telling the story of who they are and what they do, and (2) identify potential areas of focus for continuous improvement efforts," she said. Muller explained that her district has used its Organizational Profile as the context for thinking about its performance in all areas. "Excellence in the 5 ‘A’s of Academics, Activities, Attitude, the Arts, and Athletics is one of the district’s core competencies," she added. "It represents our focus on educating the whole child, even in challenging economic times when many districts elected to cut fine arts and other elective programming." "To meet the changing nature of the first "A"—academics—we’re piloting a device-to-student ratio of 1:1 in our instructional technology plan," she added. "This year, all students in grades 9 through 12 have a Chromebook and access to a learning management system through which teachers deliver blended instruction that students can access at school and at home." This photo collage depicts the district’s focus on its "5 A’s." Image used with permission of Jenks Public Schools. Muller will present "Beginning the Baldrige Journey: First Steps Toward Performance Excellence" at the Baldrige Program’s 27th Annual Quest for Excellence® Conference. To learn from this and other sessions featuring role-model Baldrige Award recipients sharing best practices, register for the Quest for Excellence, April 12-15, in Baltimore, MD.  

Posted by Christine Schaefer As the sun was setting Sunday on one of the first balmy days of the year in Baltimore, Maryland, four role models officially received the nation’s highest award for organizations that have demonstrated excellent performance. Following are highlights of remarks conveyed at the Baldrige Award ceremony by senior leaders of each of the 2014 recipients. PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice (McLean, Virginia) Pictured from left to right: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Acting Director Willie May, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, PwC PSP US Public Sector Leader Scott McIntyre, PwC PSP US Public Sector Director/Baldrige Leader Allison Carter, and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews "We couldn’t be more thrilled," PwC US Public Sector Leader Scott McIntyre said in accepting his organization’s Baldrige Award. "The Baldrige Award is highly coveted and enormously respected by organizations in every industry and raises the profile of quality advancement in the U.S. and around the world," said McIntyre. "This is a big milestone for my team and for the broader organization PwC." McIntyre expressed gratitude for his organization’s culture, which "insists on quality and accepts risk taking in a high-quality manner." He thanked his team members who were present in the ceremony audience and all 1,100 employees of PwC Public Sector Practice. He also extended appreciation to the 195,000 PwC employees working in 157 countries with clients of the organization’s public sector and commercial sector financial services. "We’re thrilled to see what happens when you really put your focus on quality improvement, on really listening to your customers and your clients, setting your egos aside and trying new things in the name of the advancement of quality and innovation," said McIntyre. "We’re thrilled with the results, but we’re also delighted to see how we can help other companies in different industries learn from us, even as we learn from them," he added. "It’s an exciting time to be creating jobs and to be contributing to innovation in the United States." Hill Country Memorial (Fredericksburg, Texas) Pictured from left to right: NIST Acting Director Willie May, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Hill Country Memorial Chief Executive Officer Jayne E. Pope, Hill Country Memorial Executive Director of Business Intelligence Debbye Dooley, and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews Among the many workforce and community members Hill Country Memorial Chief Executive Officer Jayne E. Pope thanked as she accepted the hospital’s 2014 Baldrige Award: "All of you people with those cowbells" (who enthusiastically rang them during the award ceremony as the hospital’s name was called out from the stage). With visible emotion, Pope honored the personal sacrifices sometimes made by her organization’s employees and volunteers in carrying out their jobs of delivering health care and related services. She also expressed appreciation for the support of the organization’s "visionary board," its foundation, and the community. "We understand the importance of rural health care in America," said Pope. "And we believe rural health care is world-class." "We embraced the Baldrige Criteria as … a wise and trusted friend, and now we turn to it in everything we do," she said of the hospital’s journey to excellence. Pope also acknowledged the contributions of former Baldrige Award recipients: Their "transparency and sharing of best practices have made each of us better and really modeled the spirit of this award," she said. St. David’s HealthCare (Austin, Texas) Pictured from left to right: NIST Acting Director Willie May, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, St. David’s HealthCare President and Chief Executive Officer David Huffstutler, St. David’s HealthCare Vice President of Quality David Thomsen, and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews "For the past few years, St. David’s HealthCare has been using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to improve as an organization," recounted David Huffstutler, the organization’s president and chief executive officer, in accepting its 2014 Baldrige Award Sunday evening. "This has been an extraordinary journey as we have come together around a unified goal of becoming a better health care system." Huffstutler thanked St. David’s HealthCare’s partner organizations—HCA, St. David’s Foundation, and Georgetown Health Foundation; its community members serving on the organization’s hospital boards; and the 8,100 employees and more than 2,000 medical staff members. "If it weren’t for every one of these individuals and their unwavering commitment to excellence, we obviously wouldn’t be here today," he said. "Going through the Baldrige process has been truly transformational for us, and it continues to make us better," said Huffstutler. "That’s really what the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is all about. It’s about measuring ourselves against the highest-performing organizations in the nation and applying what we learn along the way to help us improve." "It’s humbling to be recognized as a role model for organizations across the country," he said, adding that his organization plans to continue raising the bar as it is committed to performance improvement. "Aristotle once said, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’ On behalf of everyone at St. David’s HealthCare, I want to thank the Baldrige program for helping us to instill the habit of excellence in our organization." Elevations Credit Union (Boulder, Colorado) Pictured from left to right: NIST Acting Director Willie May, Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Elevations Credit Union Chief Executive Officer Gerry Agnes, Elevations Credit Union Senior Vice President of Enterprise Performance Pete Reicks, and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews In accepting his organization’s award at Sunday’s ceremony, Elevations Credit Union Chief Executive Officer Gerry Agnes told of how the nonprofit began its Baldrige improvement journey during the widespread financial crisis in 2009. "For a small financial institution, to enter that crisis was a daunting task," he said. But "our board of directors had a great vision." "We chose the Baldrige framework, which really helped us ask some very important questions—questions that all leaders should be asking their organization," stated Agnes. "Over the course of six years, we improved our organization substantially," he said. And he credited the credit union’s 350 employees for making "this effort come to fruition." Agnes surprised the audience and elicited enthusiastic applause for his tribute to employees’ loved ones. After calling out many by their first names, he explained to the audience, "They’re the wives, husbands, children, spouses, significant others. They’re the ones who support us and the inspiration for us." Addressing those loved ones, he said, "So we salute you and thank you."  

Posted by Christine Schaefer "If we’re not getting better faster than our competitors, then we’re losing ground." (Scott McIntyre, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Public Sector Practice [PSP] US Leader) "Values are really the culture of our organization." (David Huffstutler, St. David’s HealthCare President and Chief Executive Officer) "How we live [our organization’s core competencies] differentiates us in our industry and in our market." (Jayne E. Pope, Hill Country Memorial Chief Executive Officer) "To make progress … we had to get to the source of truth. My measure of my own success as a leader: "Have I created a safe environment for my team to handle the truth?" (Gerry Agnes, Elevations Credit Union Chief Executive Officer) Those are some of the insights and lessons shared by senior leaders of the 2014 Baldrige Leaders of 2014 Baldrige Award recipient organizations and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews watch the procession of the United States Joint Service Color Guard during the Baldrige Award Ceremony on Sunday, April 12, 2015. Award recipients during the leadership plenary of the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference this week. Following are detailed highlights from those leadership presentations. Scott McIntyre, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Public Sector Practice (PSP) PSP is one of six businesses within the broader financial services firm of PwC, one of the largest privately held organizations in the world operating in 157 countries, McIntyre explained. PSP operates globally and in the United States, and he has responsibility for its U.S. and overseas operations. From the start of his presentation, McIntyre spoke of his firm’s need to attract "great talent." In doing so, he said, it seeks to build a business that is widely recognized as a top performer by third-party endorsements, which now include the Baldrige Award. "Being recognized … is very important to us because our brand is very important," he said. "We were very fortunate to learn a few weeks ago that PwC’s brand at the global level is ranked number-two in the global brand health index." According to McIntyre, the PSP organizational structure is designed to put the customer first and thus reflects "the investments we make in products and services and in people" to serve its clients’ unique needs. To realize its vision to be recognized as the public sector’s clear choice for driving effectiveness across federal agencies, the organization’s leadership focuses on three objectives, said McIntyre. One is building out a leadership capability. This includes understanding competitive dynamics, contemplating changes in the industry, and setting the tone and vision. The second is making sure it furnishes the tools to its employees to support its vision. And the third is grooming future leaders. Fulfilling those three objectives is his job, McIntyre said. He described the organization’s "leadership pipeline" as beginning with its annual intern event at a Disney amusement park. The experience emphasizes teamwork, collaboration, and sharing. "These are not just core values of our firm," he added, "They’re core tenets of our leadership program." McIntyre said one of the unique aspects of his organization’s leadership development program is its dual focus on grooming people to be effective leaders whether they stay with the organization or go on to other organizations—"whether they’re in PwC or [become] clients of PwC." A second unique leadership practice of his organization, he said, is "the way we look at what we want to cultivate" in employees. Corporate efforts to develop leaders tend to focus on rewarding performance, he said, but his organization has learned that exclusively rewarding "performers" (those "who bring in money every day") can drive away "producers" (those "people who produce big ideas … who are true visionaries"). To attract and retain people who can help the organization be competitive for the long term, McIntyre’s organization changed its leadership system to put more emphasis on supporting visionaries even as it maintains a focus on high-performing contributors to the organization’s current success. McIntyre also shared some of his organization’s learning and improvements as a result of its adoption of the Baldrige framework and process. "Using Baldrige to improve was, I think, one of the smartest things we did in our business," he said. "It really gave us a touchstone, it really gave us an opportunity to learn about [how the Baldrige framework and criteria for excellence] could be adapted to our organization … and to constantly measure ourselves and evaluate how we’re doing." For his organization, he explained, the process was about "taking an organization that was very successful in its marketplace and that’s growing very dramatically… and [making] changes." Among those changes, the organization refined its core competencies last year. For example, he said the organization recognized that talent recruitment and development "had to be a core competency" for the firm to remain successful. Another change was to completely overhaul its strategic planning process. Clients’ ever-changing demands and competitive pressures made it necessary for the organization to be able to rapidly develop strategy on a situation-specific basis, he explained.   David Huffstutler, St. David’s HealthCare One of the largest health systems in the state of Texas, St. David’s HealthCare encompasses six hospitals, four free-standing emergency departments, four urgent-care clinics, and six ambulatory surgery centers. It also is associated with 76 physician practices and affiliated with six hospitals in outlying areas. It is the third-largest employer in the Austin and central Texas area, with more than 7,400 employees, supported by nearly 2,000 physicians. St. David’s HealthCare has a unique business model as a joint venture partnership between the for-profit hospital management company HCA and two nonprofit community foundations, St. David’s Foundation and Georgetown Health Foundation. This partnership has been in place since 1996. "It’s really a very unique business model that’s been great for the community," said Huffstutler. Beyond the capital and operating funds generated, surplus profits go to shareholders of the management company and to both local foundations, he said. In 2014 alone, they contributed $50 million to their communities, he added. The organization’s mission of providing exceptional care "is the basis of everything we do," said Huffstutler. Four years ago, it set a vision to be the finest care and service organization in the world. While that vision is "clearly aspirational," said Huffstutler, "we really wanted to reach for the brass ring." The organization decided to adopt the Baldrige framework as a way "to really know whether we were getting better and … benchmark ourselves against organizations, not just in our industry but across industries," said Huffstutler. "St. David’s HealthCare had not had a very sophisticated performance improvement methodology prior to this time," he said. "We knew how to execute well, but we didn’t have a framework." With the Baldrige approach, the organization gained "a disciplined and organized process to get better as an organization, external expertise, and someone who can give us feedback on where we’re going as an organization." Since embracing the Baldrige improvement process, the organization learned to use the leadership system to take advantage of its core competencies: operating discipline, a culture of excellence, physician collaboration, and clinical expertise. For example, in recent years the organization has applied its operating discipline to prioritize opportunities to pursue, develop action plans, allocate resources, and track programs. He described the organization’s critical success factors as follows: Improve understanding of mission, vision, and values Communicate commitment to performance excellence "Expand the circle" (educating the workforce on why improvement is important and creating internal experts to help with improvement efforts) Ensure systemwide alignment in measurement and performance (making sure that departmental goals lined up to organization-level goals) A key success factor, Huffstutler emphasized, "is all about the culture of the organization—it’s all about believing in what you do, understanding that you’re involved in a higher purpose." Therefore, his organization focuses on driving home its mission, vision, values, and goals through "activities around making sure our employees can understand those and recite those, but more important, be able to convey" them in their daily work. The organization’s performance dashboard reflects a balanced approach with measures in three areas: customer loyalty, exceptional care, and financial strength. "Making sure we’re good stewards" of resources is his organization’s responsibility to the community, Huffstutler said. Stressing the value of the continuous improvement process, he asserted that his organization has a responsibility to keep improving and that its patients expect it to do so: "We owe it to them, so we have to get better." In the highly regulated health care industry, he added, the pursuit of excellence is also important because of both incentives and penalties tied to health care quality measures. Coming next: Insights from CEOs Jayne Pope of Hill Country Memorial and Gerry Agnes of Elevations Credit Union

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon In the recently released Conference Board Report, CEO Challenge 2015, sustainability was listed among the top five challenges for the first time. Although it was in the top five, there were regional differences, between the U.S. at challenge number 10 and China and India at 3 and 4, respectively. According to the United Nations, "Sustainability calls for a decent standard of living for everyone today without compromising the needs of future generations." According to the Conference Board, CEO priorities in the sustainability arena include developing socially/environmentally conscious products and having sustainability as part of their business’ brand identity. Baldrige treats sustainability as a holistic concept related to overall societal responsibilities. I encourage all organizations to take this holistic approach. Examples mentioned in the Criteria for Performance Excellence include: reducing your carbon footprint, resource conservation, use of renewable energy sources and recycled water, increased use of audio and video-conferencing to conserve multiple resources, use of enlightened labor practices, strengthening local community services (including education, health care, and emergency preparedness), and improving practices of your trade or business associations. Societal responsibility is one of the  Core Values and Concepts that are embedded in the Criteria and form the basis for them. Societal responsibility starts with an organization’s leaders being role models for and stressing the organization’s commitment to societal well-being. To be a role model organization, leadership also entails influencing other organizations, private and public, to partner for these purposes. And finally, managing societal responsibilities means your organization uses appropriate measures of success and that your leaders take responsibility for those measures. How does your organization perform in the big picture of societal responsibilities and sustainability?

Read the first part of this series that features 2014 Baldrige Award recipients PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice and St. David’s HealthCare. Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Leaders of 2014 Baldrige Award recipients and Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews watch the procession of the United States Joint Service Color Guard at the Baldrige Award Ceremony on Sunday, April 12, 2015 Award recipients during the leadership plenary of the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® Conference this week. Following are detailed highlights from those leadership presentations. Jayne Pope, CEO, Hill Country Memorial Hospital There is a tourist attraction just north of town—a large granite formation called Enchanted Rock. According to Jayne Pope, CEO of 2014 Baldrige Award winner Hill Country Memorial, that rock represents the history of the nonprofit, rural hospital in the hill country of Texas and its climb to serve its community, getting better and better year after year. "Any one of you who has made a climb knows that some of the most beautiful vistas are along the way," she said. "We at Hill County Memorial have been able to turn, and we have seen some beautiful sights, some wonderful accomplishments. Yet, we can’t linger, because we know as leaders, the real work is what lies ahead. . . .  Once you have committed to a climb . . . you are obligated to find the best, safest, most efficient road to the top. . . . We have integrated the Baldrige Criteria to help us get through our climb." Pope said the independent, non-tax-supported hospital is the economic and civic backbone of its communities. Opened in 1971, community members literally collected coins in mason jars to start the hospital, with over 90 percent participating in the fund drive. Hill Country continues today as a center for caring and compassion, with every workforce member appreciating its "legacy of trust" with the community and demonstrating very impressive results: distinction as a 100-top U.S. hospital four years in a row, five times in its history number one in the nation for patient satisfaction physician and employee satisfaction in the top decile Said Pope, "The Baldrige Criteria are what has propelled these results." The hospital answered its community obligation not by thinking small but with "a powerful promise," she said. Adopting the "proactive, innovative attitude of [its] founders," the hospital redefined its mission in two words: "Remarkable Always," with "remarkable" defined as performing in the top decile in America—and that’s across all hospitals, large and small, urban and rural, every hospital industry standard. Hill Country also lives by a motto, "keep it simple and remember what we are here for": an aspirational and brief vision ("Empower others. Create healthy.") and a measurable and clear mission. "Before we engaged with the Baldrige Criteria, we thought that we wanted to be the best community hospital anywhere," Pope said. "And then we started to use the Baldrige Criteria, and we started to dream bigger. We thought about being the best hospital in the nation." Pope shared leadership lessons that Hill Country has learned: Developing services tailored for its "independent-natured" community in and outside the hospital, with services such as hospice, home health, a farmer’s market for healthy choices, community industries for free health screenings, and a wellness center. Creating core competencies that differentiate the hospital in its industry and market and really living those competencies. Building relationships with patients and staff. Pope said the role of a leader is to remove obstacles for team members so that they can go above and beyond to serve patients; "It’s my job as a leader to serve the people who serve the people." Integrating the values into everything that we do. Pope said patients know when staff are living the values, as evidenced through strong customer engagement results. As CEO, Pope personally screens physicians to ensure that their personal values align with the hospital’s values, and all team members are coached to ensure their work aligns with the values. "Not a day goes by at Hill Country Memorial when you will not hear, ‘How does that fit with our values?'" she said. Being accountable to the mission. Pope defined the core competency of "execution" as really living the mission; setting a big picture goal, determining how to measure it, and monitoring it along the way. "As leaders, we believe we have the accountability to build a culture that we’re all on the same page, . . . so that’s we’re able to be working in sync." Being transparent. Pope said leaders share the desire to always get better for the sake of others. In a changing market, this is done by holding leaders accountable and ensuring transparency with the board, community,  physicians, and workforce. "The leadership system is about doing right," she said. In 2007, Pope said the hospital looked at where it performed against other top hospitals. "We weren’t great," she said. "We recognized that we needed a framework to help get us to the top, so we chose the Baldrige framework. . . . Year after year after year, we got better, until now we’re in the top 1 percent in the nation." In regards to the climb to always get better, Pope said, "We’re not perfect. We’re not at the summit. We have opportunities to learn. . . . .We can’t linger, our real work is ahead." Gerry Agnes, CEO, Elevations Credit Union In 1953, 12 individuals at the University of Colorado contributed about $50 to a cash box; individuals making deposits at 2014 Baldrige Award winner Elevations Credit Union now number about 108,000. Defining a credit union as a nonprofit, financial cooperative, CEO Gerry Agnes said the community-based organization may be small but competes with some of the largest financial organizations in the world. That was one thing he said he learned from Baldrige: identify who you benchmark/compete against. Credit unions have about 6% of the market, but that does not mean they can’t compete "mightily," he said. Agnes shared lessons he’s learned from leading the credit union on its Baldrige quality journey, which started in 2008 with the question, "Just how good are we?" Of course, the year was 2008, the midst of the financial crisis. Although one in four residents in Elevation’s primary market was a member of the credit union, capital wasn’t growing nearly as quickly as it was for competitors, neither was there significant growth for the credit union in members or assets. "Many people were asking us why would you spend financial capital and human resources to undertake [the challenge of adopting the Baldrige framework] in the middle of a crisis. And we thought to ourselves, we’re really at a fork in the road," Agnes said. "If we take the wrong fork, we might end up in mediocrity. . . . We wanted to make sure we understood who we are, where we’re going, and how we are going to get there." Agnes shared some of his leadership lessons: Build your foundation with the core values and vision; ask how are you going to get there? Make adopting the Baldrige framework about a journey to excellence not winning the award. Create a safe environment to be honest. Citing the line "you can’t handle the truth" from the movie A Few Good Men, Agnes said he was reminded that "in organizations, truth is often really hard to handle. . . . If I had one goal to measure my success, it would be, have I created an environment with my team that is safe, where we can have brutally honest conversations about salient matters that will benefit our members, our employees, our community." Get input and buy-in from all employees and the board of directors. "At the end of the day, employees want to be seen, heard, and valued," he said. "People were starting to see that we valued their input and actually took action on it. They realized it was safe to ask [difficult] questions. That enabled us to persevere." Acknowledge the "pain curve." Agnes said the credit union thought it was doing pretty well, but then employees really started looking at the data and realized they may not be doing as well as they thought. "It’s quite remarkable that over time our perceptions and reality got closer and closer," he said. Celebrate victories, large and small. "Relish every one of them," Agnes said. "Because if you celebrate with your team, you rejuvenate their spirits and keep that momentum going."  Actively plan. Agnes said Elevations is very proud of its "operational rhythm," which includes actively managing its strategic plan: "Our plan is not something that sits back and collects dust." With honest conversations and a culture permeated by continuous improvement, Agnes said Elevation’s quality journey got some momentum, and the results were clear. By 2014, Elevations had seen 2 to 1 growth in capital, 6 to 1 growth in membership, and 2 to 1 growth in assets. This "stark contrast of results stemmed from the Baldrige framework," he said. Member-centricity was our winning strategy, with fully engaged employees and a very loyal member base, Agnes said; the "financial results are the byproduct of employees serving our members and doing a great job." He added, "My job as CEO is to turn this organization over to the next CEO in better shape than it is today, and through the Baldrige framework, we [will be] able to do that."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Author Jim Collins operates a management laboratory in Boulder, Co., where he conducts, researches, teaches, and consults with executives from the corporate and social sectors. Last week, Jim Collins, an author who has sold more than 10 million book copies worldwide, was a featured guest on the radio show "Performance Excellence USA." Co-hosts Julia Gabaldon, president/CEO of Quality New Mexico, and Steve Keene, partner in charge, Moss Adams LLC, and chair-elect for Quality New Mexico, asked Collins how his findings have changed over time, about the importance of discipline and agility, and how great leaders make decisions in chaotic times. They also explored Collins’s take on how the Baldrige Excellence Framework is a "SMAC" recipe: a specific, methodical, and consistent leadership approach. Following are highlights of the conversation: Going back to your book Good to Great, what would be different today about your findings and conclusions? Twenty-five years ago, I asked what separates a great enterprise from a mediocre one, and the principles then have not changed much today. What makes a great enterprise tick are the enduring principles of the hedgehog concept, level-5 leadership, first getting the right people on the bus, a culture of discipline, confrontation of the brutal facts, and the building of momentum. What I feel really, deeply passionate about is the idea that in a world of tremendous change, we really need some principles that we can build upon. Discipline is a common theme in your research. You have been quoted as saying, "I see the Baldrige process as a powerful set of mechanisms for disciplined people engaged in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action to create great organizations that produce exceptional results." Can you elaborate on that? The blend of being able to put creativity and discipline together really distinguishes any kind of outstanding enterprise. Think of it as you have disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action. When you stand back and examine how somebody really begins to build momentum, that’s what they’re doing. The interesting thing about building a culture of discipline is the idea that in the end almost fanatic levels of discipline—but not rigidity—doing the things that produce the best results with great rigor—separate excellent-from-mediocre enterprises. If I do something a little bit better consistently over a very long period of time, it compounds to a gigantic result, like pushing a fly wheel. You start pushing in an intelligent and consistent direction, and after a lot of effort, you finally get a big, giant, creaky turn, but the discipline then comes. You build more and more momentum, and then you get this great, powerful, cumulative effect of the fly wheel, but to say, "Oh that’s too hard, we need a new fly wheel," that’s a lack of discipline. The real discipline comes in the compounding effect. One of the things that always struck me about the Baldrige process is it’s a way of institutionalizing a culture of discipline. It’s entirely the antithesis of what’s dysfunctional with disciplinarians: geniuses with a thousand helpers who personally discipline people. We’re talking about making an entire cultural ethos where everyone is engaged in a systematic, methodical, consistent approach to making things work better day upon day, week upon week, year upon year, over a long period of time. You have written, "Scale innovation to blend creativity with discipline." Tell us more. We wanted to research the role that innovation plays in helping enterprises and companies become big winners in environments that are full of chaos and change. Innovation is definitely important, but it’s kind of a threshold item. What we really found that is more important is the ability to scale innovation based upon an empirical assessment of what works, or what we call fire bullets and fire cannon balls. Essentially think of it as you have a ship bearing down on you. One approach would be to take all of your gun powder, put it in a big cannon ball, and fire it at the attacking ship, hoping it hits, but then it misses. You’re out of gun powder and in trouble. But you could take a different approach, which is to put a little bit of gun powder into a bullet, and fire it at that ship. It misses, but it takes the right direction, so you take another little bit of gun powder and fire closer. Now you hit the side of the ship. You know that if you put all of your resources into the next cannon ball, it’s going to hit because you calibrated it; you have empirical validation. What we found is that the companies that don’t do well either don’t fire enough bullets to discover what will work to hedge against uncertainty, fire big uncalibrated cannon balls that splash in the ocean and leave them exposed, or fail to convert an empirically validated bullet into a big giant cannon ball. When you take a small innovation that worked and scale it into something really big, that is what distinguishes the really great success stories. In chaotic times, what turns the odds in a leader’s favor? A triad of behaviors are used by great business leaders: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Fanatic discipline is the notion of a leader taking a 20-mile march, whether conditions are good or bad, as long as progress is being made. This leader exhibits self-control in a world that is out of control, and therefore he/she will be the master of his/her own results. The great irony is the more the world is out of control, the more you need to be within self-control. Empirical creativity is betting on something innovative but making sure that it is empirically validated so you don’t leave yourself exposed if it doesn’t work. Productive paranoia is about learning from mistakes but understanding that the only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive. What we found is that as the world becomes more chaotic and uncertain, you can find yourself exposed. The leaders who do very well in these environments, particularly entrepreneurial leaders, have what we call productive paranoia. If you’re a productive paranoid, you say I feel very fortunate that my glass is full—not half full—but I’m aware that it could change at any moment, so I better be prepared. These leaders carry three-to-ten times the normal amount of cash to assets—just in case things go bad. This means always staying away from the risks that could kill you when you’re going to go do great, big, dangerous, creative, adventurous things; you’re going to do those things but in a way that you are guaranteed to survive the bad luck events along the way that could knock you out of the game. When you put these three habits together, you get the kind of leadership behaviors that distinguish people that do exceptionally well in chaotic environments. What is your advice on handling large amounts of change and the speed of that change? Leaders should get a recipe that works, and once you have a recipe that works, you don’t want to throw that recipe out every two years; you want to evolve that recipe. This is analogous to the U.S. Constitution. You wouldn’t have wanted the founders to have written a constitution that needs to be thrown out and rewritten every 10 years. The whole idea is that you need to have very disciplined evolution of your constitution, and that’s where the founders came up with the amendment mechanism. We have found that the great company builders thought the same way: I’m going to build a culture on a set of values that work, but I have to allow them to evolve, and I’m going to do that through a disciplined evolution rather than just a reaction to the current fads. A "SMAC" recipe is specific, methodical, and consistent just like the Baldrige process. Regarding the speed of decision making, we asked whether the people who decide faster and act faster always win, and the answer is no. There is that old saying that you are either the quick or the dead, but sometimes, the quick are the dead. The question is not fast or slow. The question is how much time do you have before your risk profile changes. If I’m sitting on the side of a hill and there is a forest fire, I better move fast because my risk profile is changing by the minute. Or let’s suppose you have a slow-developing disease where there may be a lot of different kinds of treatments to consider. First thing you might ask is, "How much time do I have until my risk profile changes?" Take that time to go through a very disciplined analysis to determine what would be the best course of treatment. Approaches, like the Baldrige framework, help organizations get better, and the concept of agility is paramount. Can you elaborate on the importance of agility? One thing that we know for certain is that the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. Now if you don’t change, don’t have an ability to have an agile response to the changes in your world, you will become irrelevant. But the true signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency. It’s when you have no sense of a recipe, no sense of a disciplined adherence to an approach that you then apply with great imagination. There are two sides of a coin: on the one side is the fanatic discipline to really, really follow a recipe. A successful coach may evolve a winning program by improving based on the people involved and being very agile. The flip side of the coin involves luck. What we found through research is that luck doesn’t make great winners by itself, but what does contribute mightily is getting a high return on luck. When an unexpected luck event happens, your ability to recognize it, zoom out, make an adjustment, and then zoom back in and aggressively implement it, is how you get a higher return on luck. The question isn’t whether we’re going to get luck in life, it’s what you do with the luck. That incredible attention to a SMAC recipe with an ability to adjust and get a high return on unexpected luck; that combination is what separates those who end up being ten times better than others. Listen to the entire 40-minute conversation with Collins from the radio show Performance Excellence USA: https://qualitynewmexico.org/fileadmin/pxusa/PXUSA_for_sun_4-12-015.mp3  

By Christine Schaefer If you want to foster talent and ultimately grow leaders in your organization, "culture is key." That’s what you can learn from Baldrige Award-winning Elevations Credit Union. And that was a core message of the organization’s chief operating officer Jay Champion and chief human resources officer Annette Matthies as they recently shared best practices to support, engage, and develop employees during the Baldrige Program’s annual Quest for Excellence® conference. Elevations Credit Union Leaders Share Workforce Practices at the Baldrige Program’s 27th Quest for Excellence Conference. The Boulder, Colorado-based nonprofit started out in 1952 as a small credit union on the campus of Colorado University. Today it has 332 employees and serves more than 106,000 customers at 11 branches. Yet an employee interviewed on video said the organization "still feels small" due to its cohesive culture. Using skier skill levels as an analogy, Champion and Matthies defined the credit union’s performance levels for workforce-focused practices as follows: Beginner: Invigorating our culture Intermediate: Differentiating through training Advanced: Nurturing talent Expert: Growing leaders Beginner Level: Invigorating the Culture After Elevations embraced the Baldrige Excellence Framework to improve its performance several years ago, the organizational culture was an initial focus area. Elevations already had defined its mission, vision, and values when it began using the Baldrige framework, explained Matthies. But those foundational elements of culture were not well-known by employees, she said. "I couldn’t tell you what the values were back in 2009," she admitted. Integrity. Respect. Passionate. Creativity. Driven by Excellence. Today it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Elevations employees not to be familiar with those core values. They are printed on employees’ badges, visible on employees’ computer screen savers, incorporated into new-employee orientation, and used during the hiring process as a screen for job applicants’ "fit" with the organizational culture, said Champion. What’s more, 25 percent of employees’ performance evaluation is based on their adherence to the organization’s core values. The core values matter so much that the organization has let some employees go for not adhering to them, said Champion. "When you do that," he pointed out, "you show what’s important." At the same time, having fun and volunteering in the community are supported by the organization’s vision. That vision includes the statements "We are known for the good work we do in the community," and "We are sought out as THE preferred employer." "We take our fun seriously," said Champion, adding that Elevations has found that this "drives results" in the areas of both employee and customer engagement. Having fun at work improves employees’ engagement, which leads to greater customer loyalty, he said. Because "volunteering is a big part of who we are," according to Matthies, every Elevations employee gets two paid days off from work to volunteer in the community. Last year alone, Elevations employees performed 4,000 hours of community service. Champion said this has been a draw for millennial-age employees. Intermediate Level: Differentiating through Training Results for annual employee surveys in 2011 and 2012 showed that Elevations needed a better staff training program. According to Champion, the training overhaul that followed was "the equivalent of a heart transplant." The result is a month-long training program with a "Mock Branch 2.0" simulated work environment for new hires. At the end of each training week, a live assessment is conducted to measure participants’ learning. "We invest four whole working weeks in every employee’s training," stressed Champion. And "it wasn’t cheap," said Matthies of the $400,000 Elevations invested to build the intensive onboarding program. But training improvements confirmed by "hard data" show the return on the organization’s investment, she affirmed. Advanced and Expert Levels: Nurturing Talent and Growing Leaders Elevations supports employees’ ongoing development by investing in their professional certifications and providing individual coaching for both performance improvement and career development. "Millennials love this," said Matthies. "They want more frequent feedback than older employees [want]." The current improvement focus, she said, is to ensure that all employees feel that their supervisors take an interest in helping them advance their careers. "We’re going to hold supervisors accountable to having development conversations," she said. To advance performance in what Champion referred to as the "final skiing lesson," the objective of Elevations’ practices to develop employees is "growing leaders." Reflecting the organization’s Employee Value Proposition (see graphic), the focus is on "building careers, not just jobs," he said. The Employee Value Proposition of Elevations Credit Union, 2014 Baldrige Award Recipient  

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon The Baldrige Excellence Framework, as a systems perspective, has taken a holistic approach to the important topic of innovation. This perspective comprises a Core Value and Concept, Managing for Innovation, and numerous considerations within the Baldrige Criteria. Together, the Baldrige approach to innovation emphasizes both cultural/people aspects and process aspects of achieving successful innovation and provides the linkages to ensure process and people are aligned. Baldrige defines innovation as making meaningful (breakthrough) change to improve products, processes, or organizational effectiveness and create new value for stakeholders. Managing for Innovation, as the words imply, requires a combination of people and process. Your organization should be led and managed so that identifying opportunities for innovation become part of the learning culture. Systematic processes for identifying those opportunities should reach across your entire organization. The Baldrige Criteria start the focus on innovation by asking how senior leaders create an environment for innovation (culture) and a focus on action to achieve innovation. In Strategy Development, the Criteria ask how your strategy development process stimulates and incorporates innovation through identification of strategic opportunities and selection of those that are intelligent risks worth pursuing. Next the Criteria ask about the use of organizational performance review findings as a mechanism for identifying opportunities for innovation and how you manage organizational knowledge to stimulate innovation. How does your workforce performance management system reinforce intelligent risk taking to achieve innovation? What is your operational process for managing innovation? What are the results of your innovation process? The outcome of the Baldrige approach to innovation is obvious. Innovation takes a systems perspective that involves leaders, all employees, and processes in coordination. So, you might ask what led to this blog post? It was triggered by a recent HBR post entitled, "Is Innovation More About People or Process?" Andrea Ovans concludes that it is both after giving some good examples from IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Intel, and others. She also cites a number of resources for people starting innovation efforts. Take a look at "Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days," to see how to rapidly bring people and process together. (And for a very different approach to innovation, not recommended by me as the approach of choice, check out Political Activism and Innovation.) Happy reading!  

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Audience members at the recent Quest for Excellence® Conference were asked to ponder two questions from keynote speaker Geoff Colvin senior editor at large for Fortune magazine: Where does world-class performance really come from? and What will people do better than computers? Or, phrased in a better way, according to Colvin, what are humans most driven to do? For the answer to the first question, Colvin said, we all carry around deep-seated feelings; many people think the answer is hard work, but lots of people work incredibly hard at what they do, yet are not considered world-class performers. Others believe world-class performers must have massive IQs or exceptional mental acuity/memory, but, Colvin said, this is only part of the answer, as we all know very successful people who may not be the brightest among their peers. The most frequent answer is innate talent, but even this can’t be the real explanation, said Colvin, as per research, most child prodigies don’t go on to become adult world-class great or most adult world-class performers were not incredibly talented as children. The question about the origin of world-class performance really matters, said Colvin, because "in every realm in which there is competition, standards are rising," from infotech devices, to cars that can go more miles than they could just 10 years ago, to washing machines that now use less detergent and water and get clothes cleaner than their previous models. "Everywhere we look, standards are rising, and they are rising in human terms also. . . . Labor markets used to be local, regional. Now when most of our work is information-based . . . anybody in the world can do it. In fact, increasingly, we all have to be world-class great because we’re competing with everyone in the world. . . . So we really have to understand in a world of rising standards, where does great performance really come from," he said. So, what’s the answer? Colvin said 30+ years of good research across industries points to something called "deliberate practice"—practicing a specific skill, over and over, and getting better at it each time. Colvin further defined "deliberate practice" as practice that Is designed specifically to improve your performance at this moment in your development. The deliberate practice will change as you advance and become better. Pushes you just beyond your current abilities. "It doesn’t push you way beyond your current abilities because then you’re just lost," he said; "And it doesn’t allow you to operate just within your current abilities because then you don’t grow." Can be repeated a lot. Researchers have found that high repetition actually affects the physical nature of the brain, Colvin said. Includes continual feedback. Added Colvin, "You can’t get better if you don’t know how you’re doing." Colvin said that studies have shown that great performance due to deliberate practice seems to be unlimited. "As long as you keep doing that stuff, you can keep getting better. . . . As long as we continue with the deliberate practices, we can continue to do these things to ages that conventional wisdom would say we can’t." Individuals, teams, and organizations can all benefit from deliberate practice, said Colvin, although many organizations tend to ignore its principles. He offered examples of teams working together in ways they never had before with the principles of deliberate practice: high repetition, constant input, lots of feedback, and real-time results. (As Baldrige Award applicants and examiners know, expert feedback to help organizations improve is a key offering of the Baldrige Program—as part of both the traditional Baldrige Award process and the non-award-based Baldrige Collaborative Assessment. Baldrige feedback reports detail an organization’s key strengths and opportunities for improvement.) Now that we know how to achieve world-class great today, Colvin said, we must look to the future: "The skills the economy values highly are changing in a historic way. . . . Over and over, we’re seeing technology taking over jobs that people used to do. People will still be valuable, but we better figure out what skills the economy will value as we go forward because those are the ones that we have to get world-class great at." Colvin said, we must ask ourselves, "What are the things because of our deepest most essential human nature, . . . we will insist be done by people even if computers can do them." Those innate human skills are the ability to Empathize, which means discerning the thoughts and feelings of someone else and responding appropriately Work in groups Tell stories Solve problems creatively Build relationships "Many employers today emphasize these factors in people they are seeking. More and more employers understand that these skills . . . of human interaction are going to be most valuable," he said. In summarizing how to be world-class great today and tomorrow, Colvin inspired the audience to dream big: "If you believe that you can become better . . . than you will get past inevitable difficulties and at least have the chance to become world-class great. . . . Great performance is not ordained for the pre-ordained few. It is available to you and everyone."

By Christine Schaefer What motivates more than 400 professionals from a variety of sectors to individually contribute an average of at least 100 hours every summer to examine the performance of U.S. organizations applying for the Baldrige Award? Patriotic duty Powerful learning Being part of a professional community focused on organizational improvement and excellence Those are some top reasons Baldrige examiners have given over the years for why they choose to lend their time and talents to help identify top-performing organizations for the nation’s prestigious Baldrige Award—and, perhaps more important, to help many more organizations improve their performance using the Baldrige Excellence Framework. Baldrige examiners include performance management and quality leads from organizations in the business, health care, education, and nonprofit sectors alike. They also include doctors, lawyers, engineers, superintendents, professors, small business owners, and management consultants—to name a few titles and professions represented each year on the Board of Examiners. These volunteers draw on their wide-ranging expertise to conduct assessments of organizations applying for the Baldrige Award or participating in Baldrige Collaborative Assessments. Through the feedback that Baldrige examiners write for organizations each year in those assessments—and by applying their knowledge of the Baldrige Excellence Framework within the organizations where they work—they help organizations in every sector of the U.S. economy to improve and excel. Baldrige Performance Excellence Program Director Bob Fangmeyer praised the dedication and key role of Baldrige examiners last month at the annual event where they are recognized for their voluntary service to the nation. Fangmeyer observed that despite being volunteers with other full-time jobs in most cases, Baldrige examiners do a tremendous amount of work that is invaluable to the Baldrige Program’s ability to accomplish its purpose of helping organizations improve their performance and attain excellence. "You are a critical success factor for the Baldrige Program. For all that we accomplish, we can’t do it without you," stated Fangmeyer. "You are our expert extended workforce. You perform the assessments. You write the feedback reports that help organizations improve. You spread the word about Baldrige. You help improve the Criteria itself. You help us improve as a program." Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Chair George Benson and U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for Commerce and Standards and National Institute of Standards and Technology Director Dr. Willie E. May also both spoke at the April event in appreciation of the service of Baldrige examiners that ultimately benefits the nation as a whole. "I would like to extend my sincere thanks to you," said May at the outset of his remarks. He then led a round of applause for Baldrige examiners’ families "for all the time you spend" volunteering for the Baldrige Program. "You have—and I’m sure will continue to—make a very, very, very big difference on our country and everything that we do and everything we stand for," said May. "Thank you very much." Dr. Willie E. May thanks Baldrige examiners for their service at the annual examiner recognition event on April 13, 2015.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Baldrige Foundation Chair George Benson, Wolters Kluwer Executive Todd McQueston, Southcentral Foundation CEO Katherine Gottlieb, Wolters Kluwer Health VP of Customer Experience Sami Hero, VP of Marketing Leslie Schultz, and Baldrige Foundation CEO Al Faber. "Baldrige is the reason why I didn’t quit my job in 2003," said Dr. Katherine Gottlieb, president/CEO of Baldrige Award recipient Southcentral Foundation and recipient of the 2015 Harry S. Hertz Leadership Award. In her leadership role in 2002, Gottlieb had more than 900 employees, a budget of $150 million, and the responsibility to provide health care services to 40,000 people spread across 110,000 square miles of southcentral Alaska. "And I realized our organization needed systematic change in order to be sustainable and function at the highest level of quality," she said. "I believed I was not the leader to take the organization to the next step." But Gottlieb said, before making up her mind, she would look for examples of other successful organizations that had transformed themselves and tools that could help. "So when I was introduced to [the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence] in 2003, I looked at it with the same scrutiny that I would for anyone or anything entering our Tribal doors. . . . I found that Baldrige aligned with our values. I found that Baldrige does not dictate but asks questions. . . . I found Baldrige would assist my leadership in driving our system to best practices. I found that Baldrige focuses on systematic change. I chose to enter the Baldrige journey to excellence." Dr. Katherine Gottlieb speaking at the 2015 Harry S. Hertz Leadership Award ceremony To really understand that journey, one needs to understand the history of Southcentral Foundation and its customer-owners, the Alaska Native and American Indian people. "Imagine not having control over anything in your life, but that all of your life, someone or something else did. And this control was exercised over you and your family in a way that stripped you of your cultural and spiritual beliefs and even your language. It stripped you of your country and privileges, rights as a human being, and the result of this was your people became despondent and lost their voices," said Gottlieb, summarizing the plight of Native communities in Alaska. According to Gottlieb, upon passing the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, Congress said, "the federal domination of Indian programs has served to retard rather than enhance the people and their communities and denied them an effective voice in the planning and implementation of programs that respond to the needs of people." She said the federal government recognized that if the people receiving health services owned their own health care, health statistics would improve. Alaska Native and American Indian people chose to exercise this law throughout the entire state of Alaska and are now operating and managing their our own health care systems. In 1991, as the new CEO of Southcentral Foundation, Gottlieb said the health care system chose to create vision statements, goals/shared responsibilities, and operational principles based on relationships. Outcome measures, population-based services that recognized the community’s culture and strength, infrastructure, culturally appropriate buildings, and listening mechanisms had to be established as the customer-owners, the Alaska American Indian people themselves, took over their own health care. In 2004, Southcentral Foundation started using the Baldrige model. "The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence has played a tremendous role in providing a systems framework to transform a slow, medical, bureaucracy [into an] agile, customer-driven system of care. . . . I owe Baldrige a lot," she said. She added, "Baldrige does not control but relies on creativity and innovation for answers. Baldrige didn’t try to take away our culture but encouraged it through the inclusion of our community, our people, our customer-owners, our employees." One of the first things the organization learned through Baldrige, she said, regarded the vision statement; "Baldrige came in and asked the question, ‘How does every employee know they are achieving the vision?'" After its 2011 Baldrige site visit, Gottlieb said staff members, from receptionists, to providers, to maintenance workers, could respond to how they personally achieve the vision and mission. "Baldrige revealed opportunities for improvement. . . . Baldrige gave us that common language. . . . It continues to encourage me as a leader." She said her most proud moment was the third-party validation of Southcentral’s excellence during the 2011 Baldrige Award ceremony. Organizations from around the nation and world now come to Southcentral Foundation to learn about its customer-focused, relationship-based "Nuka System of Care." According to Gottlieb, communities from Oregon, the Veterans Administration, Cherokee Nation, and Canada are just some who have begun to adapt Southcentral’s Nuka system. Gottlieb can even pull the organization’s updated Baldrige Award application—"the Little Baby Bible"—out of her purse; "This document lays out in detail the infrastructure of Southcentral Foundation. . . . How the succession planning works, budget approval cycles. It’s all in there. Everyone knows where we’re at. Data are kept up to speed. . . . It keeps us up to speed on where we are with health and safety measures, workforce, where we’re falling behind, where are our shortages, what’s happening in the global world that might affect us. . . . It’s really fun to use. It’s a format that works for us." Southcentral Foundation continues the Baldrige journey, she added, "because Baldrige is a tool that influences without controlling. . . . And allows a community, an individual, an organization, a group of employees to be free to be innovative. Baldrige encourages an organization to include its community and culture. . . . And thus we are renowned for these successes." But there is one additional success that Gottlieb proudly shares. And that is taking back the Native dance, culture, and Supiaq language of her Alaskan Native village. Not only does she share Southcentral’s model to help other health care providers improve, but, she tells me, she is proud to be giving back her culture, too.

By Christine Schaefer Among challenges PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice (PwC PSP) has faced in recent years is trying to grow within its federal market. "There is no wide space," said Rick Rodman, a principal and quality champion for the Baldrige Award-winning organization. To address the market constraints, "We made sure we understand our client," said Rodman. That understanding extends to clients’ challenges, strengths, and weaknesses; the macro environment in which they operate, and their ability to undertake change, he said. To serve clients well, the professional consulting organization must ensure its industry, technical, and relationship capabilities and must customize approaches and solutions to specific client challenges. That requires cultivating a team of qualified professionals capable of delivering impact and innovation and driven by a leadership team that values client success, said Rodman. Rodman and his colleague Karen Wilson, PwC PSP principal/customer champion, presented customer-focused practices during the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® conference last month. They shared how their organization listens to, gathers feedback from, and engages clients through six approaches: a business-development framework, an engagement management process, a client survey, contractor performance assessment reports, win/loss debriefs, and social media.1. Pursuit Wilson presented the organization’s Pursuit framework, which flows through five steps: Target, Interact, Propose, Close, and Exceed Expectations. "We had to tailor the firm’s (parent company PwC) process to federal clients’ environment, said Wilson, "They liked [Pursuit] so much that the whole firm is now using it." 2. Engagement Management Process The company’s Engagement Management Process (EMP) involves listening throughout a project lifecycle, promoting open dialogue, and soliciting actionable feedback. In a first meeting, PSP checks to ensure it knows exactly what the client wants based on the proposal. "We have to agree on the value delivered," she said of the formal process. 3. Client Experience Survey PSP uses surveys such as the PwC Client Experience Survey to measure client loyalty. Clients provide feedback on the organization’s performance in four areas: delivering outstanding quality, behaving ethically and complying with regulations, being attentive to clients’ and stakeholders’ needs, and providing skills and knowledgeable and responsive staff. 4. Contractor Performance Assessment Reports The organization also uses surveys administered by its clients’ contract officers to gain feedback on its performance. Those contractor performance assessment reports evaluate the organization’s performance in six categories: Quality, Schedule, Cost Control, Business Relations, Management of Personnel, and Utilization of Small Businesses. 5. Win/Loss Debriefs In relation to PSP’s win/loss debriefs, the organization requests a debrief from the government on both contract wins and losses. Written debriefs for individual proposals are shared with the Contracts Team, the Sales Team, and the applicable Sector Team within the organization. 6. Social Media Beyond engaging its current clients, PSP uses social media to listen to potential customers, said Wilson. Best Practices and Learning Best practices Rodman and Wilson shared are to (1) integrate listening methods and sharing data on a performance dashboard for transparency across the organization, (2) continuously refine listening techniques such as social media to promote the organization’s long-term sustainability, (3) "organize investments" in client relationships such as holding regular face-to-face meetings, and (4) to conduct annual surveys. An improvement PSP made in its survey practices as a result of feedback it received through the Baldrige Program was to broaden the base of customers it surveys in order to get more customer feedback, according to Wilson. Another improvement learned through Baldrige feedback, she said, is to share insights from debriefs more broadly within the organization. "Was investing resources in the Baldrige improvement process worth the effort?" Rodman was asked during the Quest conference. "Absolutely," he responded. Clients see the organization as more focused, and it is more competitive in its market as a result, he said.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey "Welcome to remarkable." That’s the first thing new employees at Baldrige Award recipient Hill Country Memorial (HCM) hear at orientation, and that welcome comes personally from CEO Jayne Pope. When staff members of the 86-bed community hospital refer to what is "remarkable," they mean the culture, and when they define "remarkable," they mean in the top 10% of patient care—not for rural hospitals or small, nonprofit hospitals, but for all hospitals in the nation. In a Quest for Excellence® presentation on HCM’s workforce, presenters and panelists shared how they build a "remarkable always" culture by hiring a "team of champions," with each team member’s personal values in absolute alignment with the organization’s values ("If we don’t have the right people in place, we can’t do what we need to do for the people we serve," said Amanda Stevens, executive director, Hill Country Memorial Hospital Foundation.) aligning each team member’s goals with the organizational strategy map and departmental goals maintaining a performance management system with quarterly coaching plans and evaluations based on position competency and demonstration of values setting high expectations involving front-liners and physicians, as well as other workforce members, in decision making and action plans being transparent (all results from the organizational strategy map for that quarter are posted on hospital walls) HCM’s values—others first, compassion, innovation, accountability, and stewardship—are extremely important, said Alysha Metzger, director, human resources, because HCM’s "patients truly are our friends, family, and neighbors. They have come to expect a level of care, service, and interaction as such." A few years ago, Metzger said, a 31-person team that included multiple levels of leaders, team members, physicians, and community members identified and defined the five values, as well as what it looked like to live those values, and they brought those draft values on a "listening tour" to every department and every shift, as well as to community members. In addition, HCM defined the minimum expected behaviors for these values to which each and every staff member and vendor could expect to be held, and these included the behaviors that physicians expected for themselves and their peers. A key component to ensure the expected behaviors for each value is HCM’s quarterly coaching plan, which shows alignment between department and individual goals to help staff members align their work to what the organization is trying to accomplish, said Metzger; "[a coaching plan] helps team members see how they’re doing their job, and doing it well helps us as a departmental team, which ultimately helps us as an organization. That’s something that is really special." The tool is used by supervisors and their designees to give quarterly feedback to staff members on how they are meeting goals and demonstrating the HCM values and performance characteristics. Leaders also receive feedback on how they are demonstrating specific leadership attributes. The coaching plan also helps team members identify measures of success; if they are not surpassing the goals, then a coach can talk with the staff member about what’s preventing accomplishment of goals. "The most important thing is creating a dialogue between the leader and team members," said Metzger. "What does the person want to achieve both personally and professionally? Values are incorporated as well. It’s important to give people feedback on whether they are demonstrating behaviors that are in alignment with our values." Gina Enderlin, HCM’s nurse educator, said because coaching plans allow communication about personal and professional goals, they can be used to prevent physician and nurse burnout. "It’s that personal communication that’s so important," she said. "[Coaching plans] gives us the opportunity to see and to hear where they’re at, to find out what they need and the direction that they want to go." John Phelps, director, nutrition services, said the coaching plans were initially not well received because of the perceived level of work on directors, but he said they eventually saw the value of open dialogue with staff. He added that the process got faster and more efficient after staff members realized that they were being coached not counseled. The coaching plans also help HCM take a proactive stance on turnover, especially for critical positions like nurses, said Enderlin. Quarterly coaching means leaders are in constant communication with team members, including nurses. "Most important is the listening," she said. "You have to hear, have to really listen to desires and interest. After hearing someone’s personal and professional goals, we can afford them the ability to cross-train, if desired." After implementing values-based interviewing and coaching plans, turnover for first-year nurses decreased about 4%, said Metzger. The quarterly coaching plans are not part of human resources or official performance reviews intentionally, said Metzger, and the success of the coaching plan process can be measured by a specific question on the Press Ganey engagement survey that asks about supervisors providing feedback to help goal achievement. Physicians and volunteers participate in a similar process to the quarterly coaching plans. Both processes include the strategy of open dialogue and listening, which for physicians is leading to higher engagement. Said James Partin, HCM’s chief medical officer, "The biggest issue [for engaging physicians] is communication, communication, communication, and that has to be two-way. Involve [physicians] in the decision-making process. What turns [physicians] off the most is . . . telling them this is what you are going to do without involving them in the process of making the decision." Volunteers also participate in open dialogue. According to Phelps, conversations with volunteers yield information on whether they are exhibiting the values, want to increase hours, or might find a better fit elsewhere in the organization. How might coaching plans work in your organization?