The Baldrige Criteria For Performance Excellence

The history of management is littered with outmoded fads, those tools that seem to have a short shelf-life. There are a few that are seemingly enduring, but one that perhaps does endure is the Baldrige Excellence Framework.

Since its inception in 1988 thousands of organizations around the world have used the framework to improve their organization’s effectiveness and achieve sustaining results. It has gone through its own evolving path to continue to adjust and stay relevant by changing or constantly adjusting its criteria every few years.

It aims to be a leading edge of validated management practice, and we’ll come back to whether that is the case another time.

Explaining the Basics of Baldrige

Baldrige has a simple purpose: to provide the framework to help your organization, no matter its size or type (business, non-profit, education, government, healthcare) covering manufacturing, service, small businesses alike, focusing on knowing the critical aspects of managing and performing as an organization. It builds around an integrated performance management framework that the whole organization engages with, to improve overall performance and strive towards excellence.

The value is that Baldrige is intentionally non-prescriptive. It does not tell leaders how to manage their organizations. There are no two organizations alike – organizations operate in different environments, even in the same industry or market, are pursuing different strategies; they have different core competencies; and they are addressing different strategic challenges (internally and externally).

Organizations assess their own system against the detailed material available. This works through the foundation criteria for performance excellence based on seven categories, six of which represent a collection of processes and the seventh represents outcomes.

The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have proven in healthcare as well as other industries to be an effective roadmap through complex and challenging conditions. The Baldrige criteria provide a structured approach to performance excellence. They move organizations from providing good quality care for one patient one time to all patients all of the time.

This press release provides a brief  overview of the Baldrige criteria, and tells how organizations use it.

In a nutshell, and organization that has been evaluated and awarded based on the Baldrige Excellence Framework is an organization that demonstrates performance excellence. They are well-led organizations that provide high-quality services and products. They have satisfied patients and other customers as well as satisfied employees and staff.

The organization obtains excellent results in multiple areas — healthcare and operational performance outcomes, patient and employee/staff satisfaction, financial and organizational viability, information use and knowledge transfer, process management — and they are good citizens in their community. Who would not want to work for an organization that has these qualities?

Beyond identifying these excellent performing organizations, the primary purpose of the Baldrige program is education. In exchange for the prestige associated with receiving an award, recipients are obligated to share with others “how they did it.”

They conduct this sharing through conferences that showcase best practices, supporting state and local award programs, and hosting visits to their sites. The Global Excellence Assembly Awards program experience has been that recipients are very generous in this sharing.