Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon
Preceding the annual Quest for Excellence (Quest) conference last week, we held the third face-to-face meeting of our Baldrige Executive Fellows. I reported on the second meeting of the Fellows in an earlier blog. This time, the Fellows also had the opportunity to attend Quest. If I was energized before this meeting of the Fellows, I am doubly so now. What a great Image may be NSFW.
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group of people, what stimulating discussions, and what an amazing collaborative learning experience. The Fellows had the opportunity to spend time with two former Baldrige Award winners, Paul Westbrook and his senior leadership colleagues from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and Paul Worstell from the PRO-TEC Coating Company. Their topics for this meeting were workforce and customer focus. But before I share some nuggets from those discussions, let me tell you about a couple of the other opportunities the Fellows had at this meeting. Each Fellow has selected a year-long project of strategic significance to their organization’s business. At this meeting Fellows updated each other in three-minute speeches about those projects and posed questions where they wanted some input from the other Fellows. This process, repeated at each meeting, has already resulted in benchmarking visits among Fellows’ companies, comments on potential blind spots to explore, and advice on approaches to pursue. The Fellows also had a dinner with a guest from their own company, executives from the seven Baldrige winners from 2010, and members of the Baldrige Foundation Board. The conversation in the room was so intriguing that it became hard to decide whether you should turn left, right or across your table.
Before I risk going on too long for a blog post, let me share a very few nuggets from the meeting with Ritz-Carlton and PRO-TEC for you to consider in your own organizations. Consumer customers today are wired, tired, and focused. You need to delight them in a way that recognizes their situation and needs. Business customers are focused, want honest relationships, and supplier agility. Your employees are constantly listening to you for clues. New employee orientation should be emotional. Gaining emotional commitment to the organization early speeds up learning by 6-7 months. Communication between supervisors and employees and among employees needs to be worth-based and not hurt-based. Too often words not chosen carefully lead to hurt rather than help, when the goal was open communication to help a colleague achieve high performance. While these are very few nuggets from much longer discussions of all concepts associated with customer and workforce focus, they are three easy concepts to agree with and internalize, yet challenging to change or establish in organizations. How is your organization doing? Your comments are welcomed!
And, BTW, if these comments about our Executive Fellows’ Program intrigue you, we will soon be opening the application process for our second cohort group of Fellows. Consider having your company apply.
