The growing need for organizations to become more efficient and effective in implementing their short and long term goals has created a demand for a framework that uniquely confers them an added advantage to such improvement. This demand has led to the continued formulation of different frameworks that try to get just the right combination that ensures improved organization performance that assures sustainable result over a long period. Baldridge Excellence Framework is one of these many such systems that provide a guideline that ensures improved performance excellence by providing a principle outline to the success of performance strategies, values, and practices meant to be implemented for progressive growth process (Ruben, 2016). The Baldrige Program is a proven framework that ensures excellence by providing a systemic process approach that bases its success on a set of core values and principles that ensure improved performance by nurturing belief and behaviors systems that are crucial to improving an organization's culture.
Baldrige Process
The Baldrige Process comprises of seven interacting categories that form the basis of the whole framework. Each of these categories cannot work in singularity, and the whole framework works as an interactive process that allows for improved performance in the organization as a whole. The seven categories are:
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Leadership
Strategic planning
Customer focus
Measurement, analysis and knowledge management
Work-force focus
Process management
Results (Miguel, 2008)
The Baldrige process is built on the embedded belief and behaviors that are inlaid within the Core Values and Concepts of an organization. The Baldrige change process hence concentrates in first changing an organization's core values and concepts in positively affecting all the other six categories to an improved effect. The Baldrige process intends to infuse visionary leadership that ensures improved system performance which results in improved results (Baldrige, 2013). This foundation provides the organization with the correct measurement, analysis, and knowledge management principles that are crucial to the efficient and effective fact-based management process that ensures a nimble system that ascertains an ever-improving performance.
This foundation positively influences the leadership, the profile the organization has, and the result gained. These three elements find their purpose on an integrating and interacting system that entails strategy, customers, work-force, and operations to ascertain good results. The elements are divided into a leadership and a result triad that work together to create an improved organizational profile. The leadership triad is made up of leadership, strategy, and customers, while the resulting triad is made up of work-force, operations and results. The leadership triad emphasizes on the value of leadership, making an intentioned focus on customers and strategy (Link, 2019). This provides an improving leadership strategy that ensures the correct strategy is adopted to ensuring customer satisfaction with an intentioned desire to see improvement. The result triad emphasizes on having an efficient work-force process that ensures that those vital operational processes are efficient enough to warrant improved performance results. The two triads work together to ensure overall holistic organizational improvement in every area, which improves the profile of the organization.
Organizational Issues
The attainment of an organization-focused initiative is usually truly difficult to achieve, taking into consideration the very many constantly moving facets that involve running an efficient functional system. The Baldrige Framework is intentioned to create a fusion that allows for all the different moving facets of an organization to work together and ensure that the leadership is able to provide a guideline for improved function within a system with so many vulnerabilities. The Baldrige Framework is intentioned to address organizational issues that hinder fluidity and hence curtail the efficiency that could result in consistent improvement.
Lack of Clear Direction
The lack of direction is perhaps one of the most common organizational problems that profoundly affect the principle nature of what an organization is purposed to be in continued progressive growth. The lack of direction is usually brought about by a lack of clear communication by the leadership crop and the 'overcrowding' of very many administrative activities which creates confusion ( McKenzie, 2017) . Direction in an organization is the purposeful and strategic guideline that provides a clear pathway to the leadership in knowing what and where the organization is supposed to be at a specific time.
The lack of clear leadership communication channel encourages duplication of instructions that are usually contradictory of each other. Within an organization that is not singular in function but multidepartment in structure, the need for a clear communication channel cannot be over-emphasized. The lack of communication usually means that there is no coherent strategy which leads to indecision by the management. When there is no communication, the leadership ends up issuing contradictory instructions that confuse the work-force. The Baldrige Framework is structured to ensure strategic planning and efficient leadership that creates a clear guideline for each person within the organization. This ensures no duplication of activities and resources are used efficiently and effectively.
Inability to Develop Critical Competencies and Behaviors
Diversity in an organization usually means improved performance; however, it can also spell disaster when the diverse character traits are not evenly matched to their competencies. The inability to match technical talent, experience, and subject-matter expertise within any organization usually results in significant performance shortcomings. The assumption that leading and managing is all about the theoretical application of leadership skills, rather than unique expertise in leadership skills, usually results in performance gaps that affect employee motivation. Baldrige process provides an integration process that ensures a coherent and cohesive interaction process between leadership and employees (Gavin, 2014). This marries two very contradictory functions of an organization that are instrumental in improved performance of the whole organization.
Lack of Awareness
Culture and workplace environment plays a massive role in influencing how employees interact with each other and with the management. Most leadership teams get lost in operational necessities that distract them from celebrating the small joys/progress, investing time to review existing processes, recognizing every person within the whole chain process, and creating a talent pipeline that creates a future for the organization. As a result, workers become disengaged and lose their focus and commitment to work for the leadership, which results in diminished progress (Gavin, 2014). This lack of awareness to these rather minute but essential elements of an organization’s function usually costs the organization valuable resources when trying to correct these indignities through hiring and firing. The Baldrige Framework ensures the leadership and management teams retain a focus by having the correct core values that guide these teams to improved awareness.
Personal and Organizational Learning
Personal and organizational learning is a progressive process that consistently, through practice and a desire to understand and challenge the boundaries, create knowledge that holistically improves the function of the organization (Miner & Otoole, 2018). The Baldrige Framework is one that grew out of a need in the 1980s, and today it has progressively infused those overarching attributes that place emphasis on quality. Importantly, the Baldrige process is not one rigid framework that demands organizations to fit into it; rather it is a framework that can be tailored to meet the diverse and unique requirements of individual organizations.
The Baldrige process can be regarded to contain a true-systems perspective, which picks up those individual and vital components of an organization and realigns them with each other to create an efficient and enjoined function. The realignment of the work-force, the leadership, the strategy, the customer focus, and the management systems into one efficient system that produces the best results underline the role of the Baldrige framework in improving performance.
Organizations usually adopt relatively short-term strategies that are structured between short periods, with the expectation that the business world will change. This expectation usually leads to gaps that are usually meant to address the change in management or a sudden shift in business structure. In most cases, this creates inconsistencies that affect business function as management systems try to compensate on missing links (Becker, 2017). The Baldrige Framework identifies the importance of creating a holistic self-sustaining system that consistently and progressively readjusts itself in a complementary process of having management systems that utilize those crucial components that are in place.
Corporate Responsibility
Corporate responsibility entails taking responsibility for those actions that impact on the community, the employees and any other stakeholder affected by the organization's activities. The Baldrige framework is one that is structured to only work if the leadership and the organization as a whole show the desire and willingness to develop, support, and uphold an organizational culture that bases its functions on those core values that imbue responsibility; with there being a willingness to commit on the long-term. An organization culture that is structured on responsibility upholds a commitment to not only the internal functions of the organization, but also to those external ones that impact directly on the organization success. Adopting a global perspective, with an emphasis on quality and within an EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) model, public responsibility becomes an essential component in delivering excellence to shareholders, the society, customers and the people involved (Thomsen, 2006). Attaining sustainable financial growth and success is all about keeping the customers satisfied by providing services and products that add value to them, with the goal of maximizing on loyalty and growing a lasting reputation. The Baldrige Framework is structured to ensure satisfaction that entails upholding a responsibility that ensures the creation of value to its customers and to those it affects directly or indirectly.
References
Baldrige, M. (2013). Baldrige health care criteria for performance excellence . Gaithersburg, MD: American Society for Quality (ASQ).
Becker, M. C. (2017). Organizational Routines and Organizational Learning. The Oxford Handbook of Group and Organizational Learning . doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190263362.013.4
Gavin, W. J. (2014). The Context of Diversity versus the Problem of Diversity. Pragmatism and Diversity , 5 (2). doi: 10.1057/9781137010605.0005
Link, A. N. (2019). On the social value of quality: An economic evaluation of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. The Social Value of New Technology , 61–70. doi: 10.4337/9781788116336.00009
McKenzie, A. (2017). Introduction. Organization Development , 79–84. doi: 10.4324/9781315125886-17
Miguel, P. A. C. (2008). Business excellence through a world-class organizational structure: experience from the Baldrige National Quality Program. International Journal of Business Excellence , 1 (1/2), 175. doi: 10.1504/ijbex.2008.017573
Miner, A., & Otoole, J. (2018). Organizational Learning and Organizational Improvisation. The Oxford Handbook of Group and Organizational Learning . doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190263362.013.31
Ruben, B. D. (2016). Excellence in higher education Guide: a framework for the design, assessment, and continuing improvement of institutions, departments, and programs . Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
Thomsen, S. (2006). Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility. Corporate Social Responsibility , 40–54. doi: 10.1057/9780230599574_4
