Guest Blog from Erin Ketelle

By now I am guessing that most IPS employees have heard the five letters “TNCPE.” For those not familiar with TNCPE, the acronym stands for Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. TNCPE operates a four level awards program based on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.  As part of the IPS Leadership Academy, our class project was to submit a level 1 application and a level 3 application.

I will admit when we started the project I was completely lost. I read the criteria book multiple times and did so many Google searches on the criteria that it still comes up in my search auto fill. I felt like I was reading some foreign language.  I have come to learn that I actually was reading a foreign language, the Baldrige language.

In my quest to try to better understand the criteria and process, I attended the 2011 TNCPE Conference and a pre-conference workshop on level 1 application writing. I left the workshop a little more comfortable with the terminology, but I was still very apprehensive with the thought of working on an application. Thankfully, I had great groups to work with in drafting our level 1 application which was submitted in August 2011. 

After completing our level one application and site visit, our teams were back to work, but this time on a level 3 application. The level 1 application we completed previously was a five page organizational profile, now we were on to the 35 page application with much more detailed questions all written in Baldrige language.

In our early stages of working on the level 3 application, I felt like someone who had taken an introduction to Spanish class trying to understand a fluent speaker. It wasn’t the words that didn’t make sense it; I was struggling with how to respond to the questions. Remembering the benefit of attending the application workshop the previous year, I decided to attend an advanced application workshop at the 2012 TNCPE Conference. During the workshop and conference things started to fall into place and all the Baldrige stuff was making sense. I had finally gotten myself to think Baldrige. I left the conference so engaged and excited about Baldrige that I even talked my boss into letting me become a TNCPE Examiner.

I took my new understanding and excitement back to our application writing team and became our team leader. Once I really understood the value of Baldrige and the criteria itself, the application changed from a Leadership Academy assignment to something I really wanted to work on. Our team worked diligently through the spring and submitted our level 3 application in July. We are very excited to have our site visit and receive our feedback report. I am very thankfully that my participation in the Leadership Academy introduced me to TNCPE and the Baldrige Program.