Last week I received a postcard inviting me to register for the 20th Annual Quest for Excellence ® Conference to be held in Washington, D.C. on April 22-25, 2008. I attended this conference two years ago as a new examiner for the Michigan Quality Leadership Award and found it to be an incredible opportunity to listen to and learn from leaders and leadership teams whose organizations have achieved national recognition for their performance excellence achievements.
Quest for Excellence ® is the official conference of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Award recipients are selected annually based on a rigorous review of their performance in seven categories:
- Leadership
- Strategic Planning
- Customer and Market Focus
- Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management
- Workforce Focus
- Process Management
- Results
At the 2006 conference I sat in on a breakout session featuring leaders from 2005 award recipient, DynMcDermott Petroleum Operations Company - a fascinating organization. One of the things I remember most from the session was that the leadership team, at the beginning of their performance excellence journey, took about six months and really thought through, clarified and fine-tuned the answers to the following six questions – and I’m paraphrasing their answers a bit:
- Who are we? (Our values)
- What do we do? (Our mission)
- Who do we do it for? (Our stakeholders)
- How do we do it? (Our processes)
- How well do we do it? (Our key performance indicators)
- How do we know? (Our feedback loops)
While these six questions may seem pretty straightforward, they speak to both the broad-brushstroke overview of an organization’s vision, values and purpose, as well as the practical and measurable details about how that big picture is put into practice in day-to-day worklife. There is a lot of depth here.
I’m going to take some time at the end of this year to revisit and refine the responses to these six questions for Delta Possibilities. What responses would your leadership team give to these questions for your organization?
[tags] performance excellence, Quest for Excellence, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Michigan Quality Leadership Award, Michigan Quality Council [/tags]
