From Baldrige to the Bottom Line

An Excerpt from Chapter 1

There is no way of pulling off an assessment successfully without gaining the informed support of the leadership team up front. Remember that success is not just struggling through the assessment phase and having the findings accepted.

Key Point

Success is not just completing the assessment, or even translating the findings into sound improvement plans. Success is implementing the improvement plans properly, in order to improve performance.

The leaders have to be clear up front that this is what they are committing themselves to.

Sometimes it is not easy to win this level of support, and you may be tempted to go ahead with merely passive approval or with an uninformed commitment. For example, you may hope that this process will provide a wake-up call for a leadership team that has become complacent and is expecting a glowing assessment report. Perhaps the leaders will be galvanized into action by a report that instead reveals major gaps between their perceptions and the current reality.

Don't try this-it hardly ever works! The most likely outcome is that the report will be trashed and the authors discredited. A report full of unexpected and uninvited bad news is not effective as a wake-up call. It is more likely to be treated as an insult or an irritation-easily ignored after the perpetrators have been dealt with. The leaders are much more likely to face up to the painful truths presented in the assessment report if they go into this process with their eyes open.

One other point: obtaining a consensus to proceed doesn't require unanimity, and the senior leader usually has the last say regardless of what everyone else feels. Sometimes management is under so much day-to-day pressure that the only way to get this process started is by a firm commitment on the part of the leader. TELUS Mobility (profiled later in this book as a case study) is a good example of this.

— End of Excerpt —

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