Week 1 of Examiner Training is History!

Posted by Bob Hunt

Folks, I witnessed tremendous excitement this week as we concluded our first of four weeks of Baldrige National Examiner training.  Over 110 Examiners graduated and are now officially on our Board of Examiners and ready to begin their critical work evaluating Baldrige Award applications.

While the goal of enabling Examiners to produce high quality, value-added feedback for our Award applicants to help them improve their performance has not changed this year, the emphasis and approach has.  We have returned to a theme of being "brilliant at the basics." This means enhancing Examiners' skill in analyzing Award applications and writing excellent feedback. The classes this year were more about practicing those skills, interacting with one another, and helping one another to improve.  Facilitators stopped lecturing and took on more coaching responsibilities. The reaction so far has been extremely positive. Our Senior and Alumni Examiners have commented that they enjoy the role of coaching and mentoring our newer Examiners. And our newer Examiners, while certainly still  "drinking from a firehose," are drinking from a smaller hose with more helping hands to manage and control the water flow. As a result, they feel more confident as they depart, ready to begin their work helping organizations to improve.

All in all, a terrific start to 2010 Baldrige Examiner Training!

Comments

[Wayne Foraker]

Glad to know week was such a success. I will be attending week 3 and looking forward to all the learning.

[Mac McGuire]

Bob, That is great. I love the coaching aspect and helping the younger ones. This year I had the honor to work with three new ones who will be great. They just have to overcome the myopic view of their state program. Mac

[Larry Potterfield]

Bob,

Here are a couple questions for you:

1. Do you believe that training Examiners a Key Process for Baldrige?
2. Do you believe that Baldrige has a Core Competency in training Examiners?

and a couple for you fellow Baldrige geeks involved in your state progams:

3. Does your state program consider training their Examiners to be a Key Process?
4. Does your state program have a Core Competency in training their Examiners?

and a question for everyone:

5. Is the quality of Examiner training linked directly to Examiner turnover, at both the state and national level?

Go Baldrige!

[Vidya]

Hi,
Iam in India. How to take up MBNQA examiners training? Do we have any local trainer in India?

Regards
Vidya