Understanding the Baldrige Model

Leadership

The leadership category examines an organization's leadership system and senior leaders' personal leadership. Leadership system refers to how leadership is exercised, including structures and mechanisms for decision making, selecting and developing leaders and managers, and reinforcing values, practices, and behaviors.

An effective leadership system creates clear values, sets high expectations, builds loyalties and teamwork based upon a shared vision, encourages and supports initiative and risk taking, subordinates organization to purpose and function, and avoids chains of command that require long decision paths.

An organization's senior leaders assist in leading the organization and are those who report directly to him or her. The first Baldrige category asks how senior leaders set, communicate, and deploy organizational values, performance expectations, and a focus on creating and balancing value for customers and other stakeholders. The criteria ask how senior leaders promote empowerment and innovation and support organizational and employee learning, which is a Baldrige core value.

The first Item in this category also examines senior leaders' performance review process.

The second Item in the category examines how the organization addresses its responsibilities to the public and how it supports its key communities. Public responsibility and citizenship is one of the core values of the Baldrige management model, as is visionary leadership.

Strategic Planning

The second Baldrige category examines how an organization sets strategic directions, how it develops the critical strategies and action plans that support its directions, how it deploys the plans throughout the organization, and how it tracks performance to plan.

Many organizations use the planning process as a tool for aligning the activities of divisions, departments, functions, teams, work groups, and individuals with overall organizational strategies, goals, and plans. Such alignment often provides a powerful competitive advantage.

The planning process must also reflect a focus on the future, which is a Baldrige core value. As the criteria note, "pursuit of sustainable growth and market leadership requires a strong future orientation and a willingness to make long-term commitments to key stakeholders." Planning needs to anticipate many changes, which means it must have a variety of inputs to the process including data and information on stakeholders’ requirements and expectations, market changes and risks, supplier quality and capabilities, technological developments, competitive developments, and the organization's capabilities.

Student, Stakeholder and Market Focus

The third Baldrige category examines how a school determines stakeholder requirements, expectations, and preferences, how it builds relationships, and how it determines stakeholder satisfaction.

Many schools assume they know what their students and parents require but lack any formal processes for determining or checking these requirements. Since this is the foundation of an effective management system, an organization can find itself on shaky ground and never know why. Schools need to follow systematic approaches to gathering information about customer requirements from many sources, including focus groups, advisory councils, surveys, and visits. The challenge is to balance differing needs and expectations of students/parents.

The goal of building stakeholder relationships is to develop alliances and open communication channels. A rock-solid understanding of students’ needs and requirements and an unwavering commitment to strong relationships will help produce world class learners.

Information and Analysis

The fourth Baldrige category examines an organization's performance measurement system and how the organization analyzes performance data and information.

The category consists of two items. The first considers how the organization measures performance. The second looks at the analysis and review of that performance.

Management by fact is a Baldrige core value that promotes the selection and use of performance measures or indicators. Performance measures are measurable characteristics of educational processes, and operations used to track and improve performance. The measures should be selected to best represent the factors that lead to improved academic performance. A comprehensive set of measures tied to stakeholder and/or organizational performance requirements represents a clear basis for aligning all activities with the organization's goals and for creating and balancing value for all stakeholders. Focus on results and creating value is another core value.

Faculty and Staff Focus

The fifth Baldrige category examines how an organization enables employees to develop and utilize their full potential and how it builds and maintains a work environment and climate conducive to performance excellence, full participation, and personal and organizational growth.

For lack of a better term, the category focuses on empowerment and the many elements that support it: work design that encourages involvement, initiative, and responsibility; recognition and rewards that reinforce the organization's objectives; education, training, and development; a safe and healthful work environment; and processes for measuring and improving employee satisfaction.

As the criteria booklet states in the description of the core value of valuing employees and partners, "an organization's success depends increasingly on the knowledge, skills, innovative creativity, and motivation of employees and partners."

Process Management

The sixth Baldrige category examines how an organization manages its processes, service processes (instructional design and delivery), support processes (such as finance, Human Resources, maintenance, and security), and supplier and partnering processes. Student services are also a part of this category (counseling, nursing, etc)

The Baldrige criteria are very process focused. Most areas to address begin by asking "how" something is done. The more sound, systematic, prevention-based, and continuously improved the process is, the better it will be assessed.

This process focus also demands a well-executed approach to organizational and personal learning and managing for innovation, two Baldrige core values. Improvement and learning need to be embedded in the way an organization operates, meaning they are a regular part of daily work, the organization seeks to eliminate problems at their source, and the organization is driven by opportunities to do better (as opposed to spending every day "firefighting"). Learning and innovation serve another core value, agility, by helping create a capacity for rapid change and flexibility.

Organizational Performance Results

The final Baldrige category examines the organization's performance and improvement in key business areas: stakeholder satisfaction and results, financial and market results, faculty and staff results, student learning results, and organizational effectiveness. The category also considers performance levels relative to schools or other benchmarks.

The seventh category concerns itself with the results of all the processes described in the first six categories. Of the 1,000 points an organization can score when applying for the Baldrige Award, 450 points are assigned to Category 7, attesting to the importance of results.

This focus on results and creating value is a core value of the Baldrige model. The purpose of learning and applying the Baldrige model is to improve those results that are most important to your organization's success.