BLOGRIGE

Report from the Road

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

It has been a while since I have blogged. I apologize, but I have had a fascinating two weeks. And I am cheering! I have been at the Baldrige regional conference in the Los Angeles area, at the first meeting of the Baldrige Executive Fellows, and at a health care service excellence conference in Detroit, sponsored by Oakwood Healthcare and Press Ganey. All three meetings exceeded my expectations!

Where to begin. Attendance at the regional conference was excellent, 298 people. Big enough for a lively conference, yet small enough to allow a lot of valuable networking in a one-day conference. Four plenary speakers set the tone with great presentations on leadership, inspiring the attendees and demonstrating why visionary senior leadership is such a significant component of organizational success and sustainability. The Baldrige Fellows were particularly impressed by the passion, yet diversity of style, among our Baldrige Award recipient leaders.

The two days I spent with our new Baldrige Fellows were exhilarating. David Spong, who led two Boeing divisions on Baldrige journeys, was our executive-in-residence for the session. He fielded questions on how he got the Baldrige journey started, how he sustained it, and lots on walking the talk. Our Fellows are from diverse industries and that will enrich their experience. Cross-industry and sector learning is a major Baldrige benefit. The Fellows quickly discovered that each of them already possessed expertise in areas where other Fellows wanted to gain expertise. It will be a great year of learning for all, including the Cheermudgeon!

Then it was off to Detroit. Over 300 people at a regional health care service excellence conference. High on the sessions I attended was leadership accountability as a key factor in service excellence. The leader must be visible in setting the tone for patient/customer service. Walk the talk and the staff follows the lead or moves on to another organization that better suits their style. Case in point, when the CEO starts walking hospital halls removing trash bags in the hallway, staff realize they can do the same as they walk by!

Got any leadership accountability or walking the talk stories of your own? As always, thanks for reading!

Supporting Fido with Baldrige

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

For years, I volunteered as a foster mother for homeless dogs, and it was truly one of the most rewarding and one of the most stressful times of my life. I fostered Laverne and Shirley (yes, I often got to pick the names) who were a basset hound and beagle found wandering the streets together; Cocoa, an older labrador retriever, who was given up when the children of his family left for college; and Freddie, a greyhound retired from the track, among many others. I could fill this blog with happy stories of adoption, as well as some stories of dogs "bouncing back," one of the most stressful parts of animal rescue.

As a foster mother, I learned fast that there were things I could do to support the adoptive parents so that they would not feel the need to return the dogs (i.e., the "bouncing-back" part). In other words, I could provide customer support for the adoptive parents to give the new canine family members the best chance. The Criteria for Performance Excellence—a management tool for all organizations, including nonprofits such as animal shelters—calls this customer support the "customer key support requirements" (from Category 3, Customer Focus).

Adoptive parents needed a mechanism to seek information about their new family members, and, if their experience went well, they would refer to us other parents looking to adopt. I learned to support adoptive parents by providing information on veterinarians in their area as well as dog trainers. I provided them with adoption packages with toys and treats and other items to give them a good start. And I tried to offer them a way to communicate with me and possibly other groups specializing in that particular breed of dog to help them understand the dog's needs and requirements. These customer support requirements would vary depending on the experience and location of the adopter, as well as the breed of dog the adopter was bringing into his or her home.

When I began working with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, I found that the Criteria offer a road map of questions to consider when supporting your customers. These questions can serve as a guide, especially when thinking about innovative communication mechanisms and how to keep your approaches current with your organization's needs and direction. The Criteria made me think about many other things animal rescuers could do to give their rescues the very best chance.

And if thinking about customer support mechanisms using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence can help in dog rescue, just think how the Criteria can help in other organizations as well.

The Expansion of Community Health Care

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

Over the next five years, $11 billion in new funding is estimated to stream into community health centers as a result of the Affordable Care Act, signed into law in March 2010. This could result in a doubling of the current community health capacity, with about 40 million new, predominately low-income patients seeking treatment.

A great expansion in community health could also serve as an economic engine for communities. According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, by 2015, these centers could save $122 billion in total health care costs by providing preventative care that would cut down on the number of patients going to the emergency room and by improving overall health care outcomes at the same time.

So, with this influx of funding and new patients, how can the Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence assist community health centers—indeed any U.S. health care organization—continue to provide exceptional health care and ensure they are focusing on strategy-driven performance and long-term sustainability? The Criteria can help because they have been proven to be a working tool for understanding and managing performance and for guiding organizational planning and operational learning. Many role-model organizations have improved both health care outcomes and their internal processes using the Criteria as a model for management.

Even more than that, the Criteria are designed for organizations just starting out on their performance excellence journeys, as well as for those organizations who have experienced many cycles of improvement. The distinction is in the format: each section of the Criteria (leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, workforce focus, process management, and results) is designed with basic-, overall-, and multiple-level questions to guide an organization. An organization new to Baldrige can begin with the basic-level questions as a simplified management tool.

If the future is bright for community health, I think the future is also bright for organizations who begin with the Baldrige Criteria as a way to advance their organizations.

Which Comes First: Financial Performance or Employee Engagement?

Posted by Pamela Wong

Researchers recently tackled an interesting chicken-or-egg question of which drives the other: financial performance or employee engagement.

The research team, led by Gallup’s Jim Harter, Ph.D., and Frank L. Schmidt, Ph.D., of the University of Iowa, conducted a meta-analysis of longitudinal data gathered at three separate times from 2,178 business units in 10 large organizations. Perspectives on Psychological Science recently published the results, which found that “the predominant direction of causality was from employee perceptions at Time One to financial performance at Time Two,” according to The Gallup Management Journal (GMJ).

“It’s difficult to directly make the argument that engagement causes higher financial performance because when people are engaged, they don’t immediately make profit,” Harter says in the GMJ article. “They show up for work, they please customers, they build a safer environment, they produce higher quality products—and those things accumulate to affect financial performance.”

It seems to me that these research results are actually consistent with the systems perspective of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.  The Criteria are based on the principle that processes don’t operate in isolation; they are connected and integrated, and working together, they produce results.

To relate the examples in Harter’s quote above to the Baldrige Criteria, employees “show up for work [category 5, Workforce Focus], they please customers [category 3, Customer Focus], they build a safer environment [category 5, Workforce Focus], they produce higher quality products [category 6, Process Management]—and those things accumulate to affect financial performance [category 7, Results].”

That’s why the feedback report provided to each Baldrige Award applicant is so valuable. The Examiners who evaluate the application point out opportunities for improvement—perhaps gaps—that the applicant can focus on to strengthen performance and results—including financial outcomes.

Please share your thoughts.

 

Eye Witnesses to Excellence!

Posted by Bob Fangmeyer (a.k.a Marlin Perkins)

Well, it's that time of year again in the Baldrige Program. When all the kids go back to school,the weather cools, and the Baldrige Panel of Judges makes its annual pilgrimage to determine which of the Baldrige Award applicants advance to the next phase of the Baldrige Award Process—site visit review.

Applications for the Baldrige Award are due around the end of May each year. From June through August all applications are reviewed by teams of trained volunteer examiners. The review consists of an in-depth, independent evaluation of the application by each team member, followed by a consensus process that integrates the inputs of all examiners and produces a final product that reflects the most important strengths and improvement opportunities for that applicant.

[Cue Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom theme music]

The Judges emerge from their summer hideaways in early September and migrate to their ancestral meeting place, the tree-lined and manicured grounds of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Once they have all completed the journey and gathered around the sacred U shaped table, they are greeted and surrounded by local inhabitants of the Baldrige Program, eager to help them accomplish their goal... the identification of potential Baldrige Award recipients.

[Slow fade to black]

[OK, so I watched too many animal shows as a kid. I am pretty sure Harry would not have appreciated a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood theme, though he might look good in a red sweater]

On September 7th the Judges met and selected 16 of the 83 applicants to advance to the site visit phase of the review process as follows:

4 of 7 small business applicants

1 of 2 service applicants

2 of 3 manufacturing applicants

7 of 54 health care applicants

1 of 10 education applicants

1 of 7 nonprofit applicants

Now that the organizations have been identified, the Award Process Team in the Baldrige office is rebuilding the examiner teams to ensure each applicant receives the best possible site visit review. These examiner teams will travel to the applicant's site for one week (either October 10-16 or 17-23) to actually verify and clarify the information provided in the application, interview leadership as well as employees on the front lines, and generally be the eyes and ears of the Judges who next meet in November to select which should be held up as role models and Baldrige Award recipients.

Around 120 of the 550 or so volunteer examiners will have the privilege of participating in a site visit this year. It is an opportunity to witness first-hand how some of the best organizations in the country create and maintain a culture of excellence and achieve and sustain outstanding levels of performance.

Congratulations to all who are on their Baldrige Journey and are committed to achieving excellence! 

It Is about Core Values

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

What do the recent brawl on the Washington, D.C. Metro, healthy communities, and Baldrige have in common? If I have intrigued you, please read on.

On the night of August 8, 2010 at about 11 PM at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, DC at least 70 youths were involved in a massive brawl, terrifying other riders and causing a stampede. Violence among young people has been an ongoing problem in DC, resulting in a midnight curfew for residents 17 and younger.

Are incidents like this preventable?  The city of Coral Springs, Fl, a 2007 Baldrige award recipient, has over the last 10 years decreased its crime rate by nearly half. For cities with populations between 100,000-499,999, Coral Springs has the lowest crime rate in the state and the fourth lowest crime rate in the nation. Coral Springs has achieved this result, among others by bringing citizens and businesses together to create a strategy to build a better community.

Recently I have been having discussions with a very diverse group of people across the United States about the building of healthy communities. Healthy communities have not only healthy people but thriving social and economic systems. Obviously, components of a healthy community are low crime and an engaged, educated youth population. Columbia, Missouri is working toward this goal as it builds a community of excellence, based on all organizations using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence as a common language for improvement. Lowell Kruse, former CEO of Heartland Health, has taken this on as his mission with support from the Heartland Foundation. In the Baldrige Program we are looking at ways to catalyze a national partnership of dissimilar communities to dialog around the concept of healthy communities, with the Baldrige framework as a basis for common understanding and goal setting.

Which brings me to core values! The Baldrige Criteria are based on 11 Core Values and Concepts. Among these are societal responsibility, visionary leadership, focus on the future, managing for innovation, and a systems perspective.What if we were to use these values as the foundation for a systems approach to building healthy communities using the Baldrige Criteria for assessing our progress? I think the concept is powerful. It needs visionary leaders to make it happen. Are you interested?

Please share your thoughts and your aspirations and willingness to build healthy communities across our country. Thanks on behalf of all uf us!

Customer Focus at “Colleges That Change Lives”

Posted by Pamela Wong

 It’s that time of year—parents (including me!) are dropping off their children to begin the college adventure. They and their student are excited and nervous, hoping they have selected the right college or university for them. To help in the selection process, perhaps they consulted an intriguing book—Colleges That Change Lives by Loren Pope, former education editor for The New York Times.

Pope was one of the first to encourage students to select a college that best fits them—instead of relying on college rankings that seemed to suggest that “one size fits all.” In his book and through the foundation he established, Pope highlights 40 lesser-known colleges and universities that have, in his words, “life-changing success with students.”

These schools range in enrollment from 350 to 4,000 and share some common characteristics, such as a focus on student and stakeholder engagement that includes low student-to-faculty ratios, a commitment to undergraduate liberal arts and sciences education, a primarily residential environment, and an active alumni network that supports graduates.

In such a small, close-knit community, it’s easy to see how they could build a student- and stakeholder-focused culture. But what about other schools, such as large public universities, business schools, and community colleges? How do they achieve "life-changing success" with their students?

Many higher education institutions that are looking for a comprehensive approach to achieve success are using the Baldrige Criteria to support  their students. A broad range of education organizations have successfully used the Criteria. Just take a look at those that have received the Baldrige Award:

· University of Wisconsin-Stout—a public university that offers 40 undergraduate and 19 graduate majors through six academic colleges and schools. A full 99 percent of employers ranked its graduates as well-prepared, and 90 percent of alumni said they would attend the university again.

· Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business—a college within the University of Northern Colorado that graduates about 300 students a year. Among its results were rankings in the top 10 percent nationally on 10 of 16 student satisfaction measures.

· Richland College—a two-year community college with a student body of some 15,000 students seeking college credits and some 6,000 continuing education students. On at least four satisfaction measures that students rank as most important, it surpassed the national norm for four years.

Do you have any results to share on the Baldrige Criteria’s impact at an institution of higher education?