Baldrige Core Values
Throughout the course, we learned the Baldrige core values and concepts and how they can help in building one’s career. The Baldrige core values are beliefs and behaviors that can define quality. Quality is the mindset and attitude of a company, and companies that like to regard themselves as quality operation should have these attributes. Therefore, the Baldrige core values are attributes that depict a high-performing organization and founds the key performance and operational requirements that create a foundation for feedback and action. These include visionary leadership, customer-driven excellence, organizational and personal learning, valuing workforce members and partners, agility, focus on the future, managing for innovation, management by fact, societal responsibility, focus on results and creating value, and systems perspectives.
Core values and the course work
The Baldrige core values address quality in any organization. The primary objective of quality is to meet the needs of the customers through the products organizations give. It also means satisfying or even going beyond the expectations of end-users through attaining the standards set in the market and improving the products that are beyond the standards set in the market. The Baldrige model addresses the excellence of a company. A company that seeks to be excellent in its operations gains a competitive edge. Thorough the core values, organizations are able to practice continuous improvement in product and service delivery and to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the operations. There were, however, differing opinions concerning the Baldrige model. Leadership varies from company to company. Some leaders focus solely on maintaining the standards and status quo, while others focus entirely on continuous change and long term goals. According to the values, the sustainability of an organization is dependent on both the short term and long term factors that impact the company and the marketplace. An organization that seeks quality must embrace agility because the global market will is ever-changing flexibility will help the organization to compete in the competitive environment. However, some leaders view quality as the ability to maintain the status quo. Transactional leadership focuses on short term goals rather than long term goals. Moreover, leaders use rewards and punishments to prompt employees to conform to the laws. Unlike transformational leadership than follows the Baldrige core values of agility and focusing on the future, the leaders in transactional leadership seek to achieve short-term goals. The policies are usually constant, and such a company thrives conforming to the rules and doing things in the right way. In transactional leadership, the issue of innovation is not given a priority as the Baldrige model. According to the values, innovation is important, and all operations, work systems and processes and lead to dimensions of performance. It requires a supportive environment and identifying potential opportunities. Organizations that use the transactional leadership model do not focus entirely on innovation but meeting the rules and standards set, and this also is a differing opinion between the two models.
Problems or issues in an organization
Issues that affect performance excellence, as addressed in the Baldridge model, include employee turnovers, rigidity, and management of innovation. Employee turnover threatens the organization’s Excellency that reduces the improvement of overall performance. Employee turnover occurs when the employees feel that they are not fully valued by the organization. Failure to provide employees with a safe and conducive environment reduces employee satisfaction in the organization. Organizations that provide employees with programs to develop their careers also face a problem with employee turnover. Employees end up either being poached by higher-paying organizations or leaving because they feel their value has risen, but the organization no longer recognizes their value.
While conducting my research, I was able to find enough information from the coursebook, and the PowerPoint provided pertaining to the Baldridge core values. Apart from the coursebook, the internet provides reliable sources that have covered the Baldridge model. By combining the two sources, I was able to achieve enough information to carry out my research and understand the topic in depth. The research raised issues that I hadn’t initially considered. Customer-driven excellence carried additional information that I had not considered yet. Baldridge’s model states that the customers are the judges of performance and quality. Quality is determined by the organization’s products and services to meet the needs of the customers. It ought to understand how the product brings value to the customers. Organizations require to improve quality by reducing the errors and defects in products and services to reduce employee complaints and increase customer satisfaction. The Baldrige proceeds to state that customer-driven excellence is also determined by the company’s view of the organization. Consumer behavior is also determined by the characteristics that differentiate companies from their competitors. Customers are not just looking for companies with products that satisfy their needs. They expect more from companies. They want a faster response, special relationships, multiple access, and a reliable communication mechanism. Customer-driven excellence highly relies on agility, whereby consumer behavior is changing with the changing environments. Therefore, an organization requires to be flexible enough to match the competition that arises in the organization. Another factor that I had not considered is management by fact. People tend to forget that increased sales do not really mean that the organization is succeeding. Sometimes the sales could be high, but the organization is not making any profits because the operations costs are also quite high. Therefore, the use of the excellence of an organization also depends on analyzing its performance based on the data collected in all departments. Performance analysis should be determined y the number of customers, workforce performance, financial performance, and loss of operations. Fortunately, the research does not constrain any confusing, incomplete, and contradictory information.
Influence of the research to my thinking
The research has influenced my thinking positively. It has opened my mind to the values that a management panel can implement to increase excellence and quality in an organization. I know that when we talk about quality, we are not just referring to meeting the set standards of a product or a service, we are talking about the mindset and attitude of an organization, and for the organization to be deemed quality, it has to portray all the primary core values of Baldrige model. The model has taught me that all dimensions of an organization have to be factored in to improve the performance of the operations, these dimensions include leadership, workforce, customers, innovation, the future, data, flexibility of the operations and business model, societal responsibility and the products and services.
Conclusion
The Baldrige core values are the attributes that determine quality in an organization. It explains that quality is determined by various attributes in an organization that require to be factored in. This will be helpful in my future career because I will be able to understand how to factor in various attributes to create value in my organization, to increase customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction as well.
References
Ogden, J., & Wallin, C., & Foster, S. (2010). On Baldrige Core Values and Commitment to Quality. Quality Management Journal. 17. 21-34. 10.1080/10686967.2010.11918278.
National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2019). Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. Core Values and Concepts. Retrieved https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/core-values-and-concepts