The Baldrige Award: The Journey Is the Win

The Baldrige Award:
The Journey Is the Win
By Paul Grizzell, Studer Group coach

Is your organization at the top of its game? If so, maybe you're wondering how to make those incremental improvements to achieve the highest level of performance excellence. Or perhaps your organization's performance is just mediocre and leaders are looking for a method to accelerate improvement efforts. Maybe performance is even poor and you need a way to focus your turnaround efforts.

In my work with Studer Group partners and as a Baldrige National Examiner, I've watched organizations in each of these scenarios build a positive success spiral through the structure, employee engagement, and best practices that Baldrige inspires (and requires).

A Model of Performance Excellence
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is the highest level of recognition for performance excellence that an organization can achieve in health care, manufacturing or education. In fact, the award was developed in the 1980s by the U.S. Department of Commerce to help American business better compete in the global economy. And, while originally developed as a business quality assessment, the Baldrige Criteria have evolved into a comprehensive management system that includes the same criteria for excellence, regardless of industry. You might be surprised to learn that health care is leading the way when it comes to excellence, too. While health care organizations just became eligible to apply in 1999, nearly half of all 2005 Baldrige applicants (33 out of 64 total) came from within our industry.

Why the Criteria Accelerate Results
While every organization that applies for Baldrige would love to win, the irony is that those who do it solely for the trophy won't succeed. The extensive application and assessment process ensures that those who win the award are truly role model examples of performance excellence in practice. At the heart of the process are the Baldrige Criteria.

The Criteria are deliberately non-prescriptive and adaptable. They ask how you address the Criteria, but don't tell you what to do. In fact, they guide you through your own assessment of what's important and how you address those areas. Many organizations choose to use a combination of Studer Group tools, Six Sigma, Lean, FOCUS-PDSA, or other improvement methodologies as prescriptive answers to the many non-prescriptive Baldrige Criteria.

Organizations who apply for the Baldrige Award gain:
> an outside perspective that identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement. Each organization is measured against the same set of Criteria based on the characteristics of high-performing organizations.
> aligned leaders because the Criteria help create a single shared focus.
> laser sharp focus on highest organizational priorities because the Criteria offer an integrated management system that aligns performance excellence efforts throughout the organization.

Application, Assessment, and Feedback
Here's how the process works...At the national Baldrige level, organizations submit a 50-page application with an additional five-page Organizational Profile as a preface. An effective Baldrige application isn't simply a set of answers to the Baldrige Criteria questions. Your Baldrige application should be a formal description of how your heath care organization operates. A key to success in writing an effective application is to ensure alignment among the three major components of the application: the Organizational Profile, the Process Categories and the Results Category.


	Get More Baldrige Resources

> At Studergroup.com:
> Learn about the Baldrige Health
> Care Criteria for Performance
> Excellence and read Nine
> Principles®—A Roadmap for the
> Baldrige Criteria.

> At the National Institute of
> Standards and Technology
> (NIST):
> Read applications of past Baldrige
> Award recipients at:
> http://www.quality.nist.gov/
> Contacts_Profiles.htm

> Take a short leader assessment at:
> http://www.quality.nist.gov/
> PDF_files/ProgressAL.pdf

Studer Group's tools, well deployed, offer prescriptive ways to address many of the non-prescriptive Baldrige questions.

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1. Organizational Profile.
Writing an Organizational Profile is the first step to take in your Baldrige journey. The Organizational Profile describes what is important to your organization. It's a snapshot of the characteristics and challenges of your organization. The Profile describes your products and services, culture, key success factors, strategic challenges, and performance management system. In fact, if you do nothing but complete the Organizational Profile, gaining senior leadership input and agreement, you will have a useful tool that helps focus your organization's quality improvement efforts.

2. The Process Categories
Your responses to the Process Categories explain how your organization addresses leadership; strategic planning; a focus on patients, other customers and markets; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; human resources; and process management. Baldrige Examiners assess the maturity of your organization's responses to Process Categories using "ADLI:"
> Approach – what do you do?
> Deployment – how extensively do you do it?
> Learning – do you evaluate, improve and learn?
> Integration – how well is the approach integrated with your organizational needs?

3. The Process Categories
Baldrige Examiners assess the maturity of your organization's Results Category responses by considering how you address "LTCLi" or:
> Levels – what is your current performance?
> Trends – what is your performance over time?
> Comparisons – what is your performance against appropriate comparisons?
> Linkages – how well do performance results address key customer, market, and process requirements?

A final note: Baldrige assessments are confidential. Examiners are required to maintain confidentiality and do not disclose what organizations they assess. Because the Baldrige process is focused on helping your organization improve, results are not reported to anyone outside the Baldrige program, until you win the Baldrige Award. At that point, you are required to share your performance excellence journey and best practices as a method of helping advance performance excellence in organizations nationwide.

The Baldrige Criteria are based on a foundation of 11 Core Values. If they align with those of your organization, they offer a road map to achieve your vision, mission and values.
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A Systematic Approach to Application
Any organization that is working on continuous improvement has made progress along the Baldrige journey. In my experience coaching Studer Group partner organizations along their Baldrige journeys, I find they typically go through these stages:

> Awareness – commitment by senior leaders isn't an option—it's a requirement!
> Assessment – an initial assessment can help you determine where your organization stands against the Baldrige Criteria, building understanding and identifying initial performance gaps. There are multiple methods to accomplish this assessment—on-line, paper, interviews, or a combination of all. An assessment can also be a great way to introduce Baldrige to the organization.
> Application – the development and submittal of the application. (Note: A team based writing approach can help accelerate this process.)
> Advance – Based on the results of the application, organizations learn how to focus improvement efforts. They can determine how best to sustain strengths and prioritize and address opportunities for improvement.

After the Application
What happens "behind the scenes" after we submit our application? There are three stages of assessment before Baldrige winners are selected.

Stage 1 – Individual Assessment: Trained Baldrige Examiners spend 40 to 50 hours each assessing your application. They each compile a list of Strengths and Opportunities for Improvement comments for each area and score your application against a set of guidelines. These scores help the Baldrige Judges determine which organizations move on to the Consensus Assessment stage.

Stage 2 – Consensus Assessment: A team of Baldrige Examiners takes your application through the Consensus process, during which they consolidate comments and determine a score through team consensus. These consensus scores help the Baldrige Judges determine who moves on to the Site Visit.

Stage 3 – Site Visit: A team of Baldrige Examiners visits your organization for an indepth assessment of your organization. Site visits generally last 3 to 4 days, and provide an extremely in-depth assessment of your organization. The Baldrige examiners use the Criteria to assess an organization's performance excellence journey, provide actionable feedback, and recognize those that are national role models.

Applicants receive a feedback report detailing actionable Strengths and Opportunities for Improvement regardless of which assessment stage they reach. There is a never-ending focus on continuous improvement. (Even organizations that have won the Baldrige Award typically receive a feedback report with approximately 40 to 50 Opportunities for Improvement.) It's true that the Baldrige journey isn't easy.

Worthwhile journeys rarely are. Those who see the Baldrige Award only as another trophy will find it frustrating. But those leaders who have a vision of role-modeling excellence will find the Baldrige Criteria, the application, the assessment process, and the resulting feedback report to be an engaging, inspiring, and practical road map for their journey to performance excellence.

A much published author with expertise in Six Sigma and Lean Management, Paul Grizzell is a Studer Group Baldrige coach and frequently requested speaker. He also serves as a Senior Examiner on the Department of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Examiners.