Not Yet Using the Baldrige Excellence Framework? Five Ways Forward

Here you are, on the website of the national Baldrige Performance Excellence Program—source of the regularly updated, widely validated leadership-and-management-strengthening tool known as the Baldrige Excellence Framework (which includes the Criteria for Performance Excellence).

Are you already using this comprehensive self-assessment guide to strengthen your organization’s performance?

If not, would you like to benefit from improvements and innovation in your approaches to leadership, strategy, customers, knowledge management and performance measurement, workforce, operations—and get better results in all these areas?

Begin Using the Baldrige Excellence Framework

Try one, more, or all of the following five ways to begin to use the Baldrige framework to advance your organization’s long-term success:

1. As a foundational step toward completing a Baldrige self-assessment, read and respond to the questions of the Organizational Profile, the prefatory section of the Criteria for Performance Excellence. You can download this resource (PDF file) for free.
2. Begin thinking about your organization’s responses to the Baldrige Excellence Builder—which contains the higher-level questions from the full Criteria for Performance Excellence. You can download the free PDF or order packets of ten copies (for example, for your organization leadership team).
3. Read accounts of how organizations in different sectors and industries have used the Baldrige framework, learning tips and role-model practices of Baldrige Award recipients. You’ll find many of these stories here on Blogrige. Are you getting these blogs delivered right to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Besides reading them on the home page of the Baldrige website, you can subscribe for free to receive these blogs by email.
4. Attend the Baldrige Program’s annual best-practice-sharing conference, the Quest for Excellence® conference, held every spring. There you will hear high-performing organizations (recent Baldrige Award recipients) tell the stories of how they improved their performance using the Baldrige framework, and presenters will answer your specific questions. Learn more details about the next conference and register.
5. Participate in Baldrige examiner® training. You don’t have to be a Baldrige examiner to sign up for the Baldrige Examiner Training Experience (BETE). Non-examiner participants in this training can learn how to evaluate an organization using the Baldrige framework and assessment process in a classroom alongside current Baldrige examiners. The annual three-day training sessions are traditionally held in May in Gaithersburg (MD).

These are certainly not the only ways to learn more about using the Baldrige framework. You can also read Baldrige case studies in your sector and application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients to see how they have responded to the Criteria for Performance Excellence. And get involved with your local/regional Baldrige-based training and award program to begin improving your organization with Baldrige Criteria-based assessments, training, and tools.

Baldrige Award recipients, Baldrige examiners, and other seasoned Baldrige framework users: What other ways do you recommend that organizations get started?  

---

---