Baldrige Criteria

The Leadership Academy teams are writing Organizational Profiles for each of our agencies. This is an opportunity for us to document, in a very high-level way, our current organizational description and organizational position. A team of external reviewers will meet with each agency for a half-day to discuss our reports. I look forward to using this process to improve our aready outstanding organization.

In order to stay current on the latest Baldrige thinking, I subscribe to the Baldrige Blog site. A recent post by Harry Hertz helps explain the link between questions in the application and the evaluators point of view. I thought it might be helpful to share.



Meet the Twins 06/27/2011
Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

What twins is he talking about, you ask. The twins that are in the Criteria for Performance Excellence. The twins that have been the subject of recent discussion on our LinkedIn improvement thread. I am referring to the Baldrige Scoring Guidelines twins: ADLI and LeTCI. They are fraternal, non-identical twins, but like most twins are kindred spirits since their birth and closely linked in all they do. As most people around Baldrige know ADLI: approach, deployment, learning, and integration are the scoring dimensions for process-related items in the Criteria and LeTCI: levels, trends, comparisons, and integration are the scoring dimensions for results items. The maturity of an organization is determined by their maturity in each of these dimensions, on a Criteria item by item basis. The Scoring Guidelines, on pages 65 through 70 of the Criteria for Performance Excellence booklet, describe the maturity against each dimension at each increasing scoring range. You also notice that integration is in both process and results scoring dimensions. Integration is the primary tie that binds our twins to each other. A key piece of integration is whether the results we measure reflect results for our key organizational processes and if those results drive decision-making on strategy, need for innovation, and process improvements.

So, what does this all have to do with the improvement thread on LinkedIn? The comment that several people made is that examiners rely on the Scoring Guidelines for judging maturity, but Criteria users frequently rely solely on the Criteria requirements and do not take advantage of the Scoring Guidelines as a mechanism for both gauging improvement and maturity and for guidance in understanding how to reach that next level of maturity. Together the Criteria and the Scoring Guidelines form the full systems perspective for guiding and sustaining an organization. I liken the Criteria and Scoring Guidelines to the younger sibling and the older twins. The young sibling learns the criteria that are important to being part of the system (the family) and the older, wiser twins have learned how to succeed or fail in the family by growing and maturing to become increasingly valuable members of the family and sustain the family.

I hope this brief analogy helps organizations appreciate the richness of the combination of Criteria and Scoring Guidelines to guide progress and sustainability. This has been a rather different blog post than my usual. I would like to hear your reactions. And how does your organizational family measure up