About the 2013–2014 Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence

The 2013–2014 Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence empower your organization—no matter the size or industry—to

• reach your goals;
• improve results; and
• become more competitive by aligning your plans, processes, decisions, people, actions, and results.

The Criteria give you the tools you need to examine all parts of your management system and improve processes and results while keeping the whole organization in mind.

Purchase the Baldrige Criteria or see a sample (PDF) to learn about how to guide your organization, improve performance, and achieve sustainable results.

The Criteria focus on results.

The Criteria focus on your results in the key areas of

• products and processes,
• customers,
• workforce,
• leadership and governance, and
• finance and markets.

This composite of measures ensures that your strategies are balanced—that they do not inappropriately trade off among important stakeholders, objectives, or short- and longer-term goals.

The Criteria are nonprescriptive and adaptable.

The Criteria do not prescribe how you should structure your organization:

• They do not say that your organization should or should not have departments for planning, ethics, quality, or other functions.

• They do not tell you to manage different units in your organization in the same way.

• They let you choose the most suitable tools (e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, ISO 9000, a balanced scorecard) for facilitating your improvements.

The Criteria are nonprescriptive for these reasons:

They focus on common needs rather than on common procedures. This focus fosters understanding, communication, sharing, alignment, and integration while supporting innovative and diverse approaches.

They focus on results, not procedures, tools, or organizational structure. The Criteria encourage you to respond with creative, adaptive, and flexible approaches, fostering incremental and major (breakthrough) improvement through innovation.

The tools, techniques, systems, and organizational structure you select usually depend on factors such as

• your organization's type and size, relationships, and stage of development and
• the capabilities and responsibilities of your workforce and supply chain.

These factors differ among organizations, and they are likely to change as your needs and strategies evolve.

The Criteria support a systems perspective to align goals across your organization.

The Criteria build alignment across your organization by making connections between and reinforcing measures derived from your organization's processes and strategy. These measures tie directly to customer and stakeholder value and to overall performance.

When you use these measures, you channel different activities in consistent directions with less need for detailed procedures, centralized decision making, or overly complex process management.

Measures are therefore both a communication tool and a way to deploy consistent performance requirements. The resulting alignment ensures consistency of purpose across your organization while supporting agility, innovation, and decentralized decision making.

When you use the Criteria, feedback between your processes and your results leads to action-oriented cycles of improvement with four stages:

1. Designing and selecting effective processes, methods, and measures (approach)

2. Executing on your approach with consistency (deployment)

3. Assessing your progress and capturing new knowledge, including seeking opportunities for innovation (learning)

4. Revising your plans based on assessment findings and organizational performance, harmonizing processes and work-unit operations, and selecting better process and results measures (integration)

The Criteria support goal-based diagnosis.

The Criteria items and the scoring guidelines make up a two-part diagnostic (assessment) system.

When you assess your organization with the Criteria, you create a profile of strengths and opportunities for improvement based on your responses to 17 performance-oriented requirements (the Criteria items) on a continuum of process and performance maturity (the scoring guidelines).

In this way, assessing your organization with the Criteria leads to actions that improve performance in all areas. This useful management tool goes beyond most performance reviews and applies to a wide range of strategies, management systems, and types of organizations.

Resources

2013–2014 Criteria for Performance Excellence Business/Nonprofit, Education, Health Care
Explore Free Content Business/Nonprofit, Education, Health Care
The Baldrige Criteria 101 Word
Sample from the Criteria booklet PDF (contains the entire Org Profile)
Criteria Category and Item Commentary (formerly Descriptions) PDF
Self-Analysis Worksheet Word

Related Links

How Baldrige Works
Baldrige Impacts
Self-Assessing Your Organization
Baldrige Products and Services
Baldrige Award
Baldrige Award Recipient Listing
Baldrige FAQs

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