Malcolm Baldrige Criteria – A Business Excellence Model

The Leadership Initiative Trait

 simply defined, initiative is a trait someone has in them to take on task without having being told or instruct. Among leaders, this initiative traits is more an expectation. To acquire this trait, it requires training and cultivation.

Between initiative and decision making, it is merely a fine line in between and confusion often arised to differential the two. Take an example to illustrate; the floor is wet at the entrace, customer who walk in may trip. An initiative would be to realize the web floor and take action to clean up immediately without being told. Of course you need to make a decision to clean it up but the difference is you did it without being told

 An effective leader should discover employee who take the initiative to do the right thing as opposed to waiting to be told. Worst thing is some employee has a tendancy to wait for someone else do it. You should observe employee with outstanding initiative which is an indicator for maturity and potential. However, you should take action immediately you have discovered the initiative else it will fade away over time. To sustain employee take out their initiative, leaders should take action to encourage such initiative and give employee an opportunity to take on heavier task is his initiave warrants it

“Monkey see Monkey Do” is a phrase which describe employee tend to follow what the leader does. If you want to cultivate a “take Initiative” culture, you as a leader not only need to show leadership by example but also need to motivates employee who do so with the appropriate recognition.

Audit and Accountability: Underutilized Pillars of Performance Excellence
Craig A. Anderson, September 2009

The pursuit of performance excellence is a team sport. As defined in the 2009-2010 Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, performance excellence refers to an “integrated approach to organizational performance management” that results in (1) ever-improving value to customers and stakeholders, (2)
improvement of overall organizational effectiveness and capabilities, and (3) organizational and personal learning. Integration is further clarified as “the harmonization of plans, processes, information, resource decisions, actions, results, and analyses to support key organization-wide goals.” The Criteria emphasize that effective integration is achieved “when the individual components of a performance management system operate as a fully interconnected unit.”

The overarching concept is easy to grasp: bring people together to work as a team to achieve common goals. But as all of us know, the challenge is to move from concept to real world implementation. We need allies to make this happen. These allies are often right down the hall, in the internal audit department.

The audit and accountability function is an underutilized resource that is well-positioned to support the pursuit of performance excellence. Auditors are trained to think constructively and analytically, and tend to bring a cross-cutting view of the organization to their work. Auditors are also comfortable with the idea of using data as the basis for their findings, conclusions, and recommendations for improvement.

Organizations aiming for performance excellence must aggressively and consistently seek out areas of competitive advantage. An audit and accountability function that not only performs its traditional oversight role but also vigorously supports performance excellence offers a unique and powerful advantage. In effect, you have an integrated team of professionals that understands your organization identifying key opportunities for improvement and developing appropriate findings and recommendations.

How to get there? We suggest a four step approach to engage your internal auditors in the pursuit of performance excellence.

Step 1: Establish a dialogue
Performance excellence makes sense on many levels, but it cannot be grasped without awareness. The first step is to open a dialogue with key audit and accountability managers and staff. Introduce the principles of performance excellence and allow ample unforced time for skeptical analysis. Performance excellence will “sell itself” as long as smart people are allowed freedom to challenge and question the information. Position the dialogue as a process. And, ultimately, even if (sadly) performance excellence goes nowhere in your organization, this dialogue will result in an improved internal audit process.

Step 2: Agree on a common vision
As understanding deepens, raise the stakes by defining a common vision for the role of the audit and accountability function in performance excellence. Identify stakeholders across the organization who are in position to help define this vision. Recognize the critical importance of not impairing auditor independence in any way throughout this process; fortunately, there are no prohibitions against auditors thinking more clearly and expansively, and developing meaningful recommendations that will help to integrate performance excellence across the organization.

Step 3: Provide coaching and support
As the vision is articulated and deployed, seek out opportunities to provide coaching and support directly to audit teams. Tread lightly—you are on their turf here, but with the support of audit management, coach audit teams on how they can leverage their unique skills and abilities to move the organization along the
path of performance excellence. Our experience is that auditors do not inherently want to operate in a “gotcha” mode, but that too often this is the expectation created by the organization. Replace “gotcha” with “win-win” and you will sharpen your competitive edge.

Step 4: Recognize and celebrate success
Like we said earlier, performance excellence is a team sport. Find opportunities to recognize and reward your audit and accountability function for playing a larger role in support of performance excellence. Highlight examples of audit findings and recommendations that demonstrate an understanding of integrated performance excellence. Respect the importance of the traditional audit and accountability function, but also make it clear that the competitive landscape demands that the bar be raised wherever possible and audit is no exception. Fresh thinking and new engagement with this valuable resource can have a huge positive impact on your competitive position.

In this current economic uncertainty, most employees are worried about their job sucurity. concerns on layoff, paycut, force-leave etc are some of the key concern among employees. Due ot all these worries, they can get distracted wondering how they can recognize to keep their job. For some, they will start updating their rsume, about job alternatives, and other anxious fretting about the future. During this instable economy, it is wise to keep employees informed the company’s plan and direction. Senior Leaders need to become more transparent and help their employees cope with these uncertainty.

Leadership Transparancy is a management tools that builds trust and gives employees confidence of them in the area of looking out for their well being. Leadership transparency to be perfomed Transparency should balance the business and knowledge sharing by pommunicatiing enough information (that is – what is perceived as sensitive information) to employees as a whole as to comfort any concerns.

Below are some pointers to practice at the right level of transparency with your employees:

1. Publish and Align common goals
As gola may change due to changed in the enocnomy, sharing of this goal timely and communicate responsibility and accountability in work tasks. Be assertive to the employees with the objectives in mind.

2. Share changes to the market
While some market information may be sensitive, sharing them to the employees is perhaps the most logical things to do. Whether the business is doing and not doing. However, you need to isolate and balance confidential information with other decisions that are acceptable to let employees know about.

Be firmed to the employee but Give your employers something useful – tidbits of information that they would not know from the rumor mill. Your employees will be grateful for your willingness to approach them at their level.
3. Do what you say and say what you mean
As a effective leader, you are viewed as the only person emplyees “trust”. If you have a bad news, communicate it to the meployee and be open about it. Talk about what the impact is on the company and how employee can do to cushion the impact. Beclear and concise to the key action empoyee must carry out and not confusion. difficult tasks (like communicating cut-backs or other changes). Even if you can’t deliver on something,

4. Be Compassionate
Employee understand it is not an easy task to manage in economic downturn. They need to perceive that you are genien open to their frustration and concerns in a safe, non-threatening environment. Leave plenty of time every week for personal check-ins. Unlike a pure 1-1, a personal check-in focuses on the person, not work, to allow employees the freedom to share their intimate thoughts and feelings.  Effective department and managers know where their employee faith in the job. Employees welcome a department heand or manager balanced their taks between wrok and personal touch. After a while, better relationship is build up at a personal level, employees tends to adapt changes more willingly and faster because their emotional base is validated.

Department heads and Managers have tough job ahead. The pressure to continue to produce and compete never will stay and employees need to know their department heads or manager can be trusted. Transparency helps leaders build credibility with their employee and help to create a unified front to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.