Things Never Heard at a Baldrige Quest for Excellence Conference
When I attend conferences, I typically seek out best practices and profound advice. The recent Quest for Excellence Conference certainly didn’t disappoint, but I found myself reflecting after the conference on what I didn’t hear said.
- “I can’t learn anything from organizations outside of our industry.”
- “The easiest way to manage this effort is to delegate it to a staffer.”
- “From the very beginning, it all needs to be about ‘Baldrige.’ Banners and hoopla and slogans help motivate people to join in with enthusiasm.”
- “I wish we had waited to get started on our performance excellence journey.”
Now take what wasn’t said with what was positively presented, and you can distill the wisdom down to a four key themes.
As leaders, what you say and do matters. Your employees take their cues from you. Are you leading an organization with a focus on customers, excellence, continuous improvement, and innovation? Do they see that reflected in the measures you monitor?
Are you intentionally creating a culture or just allowing one to emerge? Are you ensuring that every employee connects to your strategic objectives, is engaged in a higher purpose, and feels empowered to offer ideas, suggestions, even criticism? Are you providing a place with psychological safety so that every person can live up to their full potential?
Do you demonstrate a commitment to your own lifelong learning? Do you have the humility and self-confidence to believe that you can learn from others? Do you only bet on sure things, or are you willing to invest in intelligent risk taking?
The power of asking questions to improve two-way communication. After a meeting ask, “What information did you expect and need, but didn’t get?” “What problem can you solve as a team that you can’t solve as an individual?”
These are just a few of my takeaways from the Quest for Excellence Conference. If you attended, what are some of yours? And have you started on that performance excellence journey yet? There’s never a better time than now. As Sister Mary Jean Ryan used to say, “If you wait until you’re 'ready,' you'll never get started!”
