The Six Disciplines Blog

Performance excellence is a journey, and the most frequent question we’re asked is “Where do I begin?”

The Six Disciplines® Organizational Performance Assessment is the fastest and most effective way to begin your performance excellence journey.  It gives you clarity about where your organization is, relative to the key Baldrige criteria for performance excellence:

Expertly designed and analyzed by our professional staff of certified business coaches, our Organizational Performance Assessment service uses questions that map to the Baldrige performance excellence criteria, and uses the Net Promoter Score approach for ranking.   

The Six Disciplines Assessment enables you to gauge the maturity and effectiveness of your leadership and management systems, and provides you with actionable insights and the clear results you need to make significant improvements in organizational performance excellence.  

Schedule your Organizational Performance Assessment Today

The Six Disciplines® Organizational Performance Assessment is the fastest and most effective way to gain clarity about your organization's performance on the key Baldrige performance excellence dimensions of:  

• Leadership / Culture
• Strategy
• Customer Focus
• Measurement 
• People
• Processes
• Results

Expertly designed and analyzed by our professional staff of certified business coaches, the Organizational Performance Assessment service uses questions that map to the Baldrige performance excellence criteria, and uses the Net Promoter Score approach for ranking.   

The Organizational Performance Assessment enables you to gauge the maturity and effectiveness of your leadership and management systems, and provides you with actionable insights and the clear results you need to make significant improvements in organizational performance excellence.  

Here's What You'll Get:

• A complete web-based, email-driven organizational performance assessment and analysis. 
• Fast turn-around (7-10 days from payment and receipt of email address list, to full presentation of assessment results).
• The ability to benchmark your organization's performance - run it again in the future for comparisons, trends, change.
• In-depth recommendations based on the seven key dimensions of performance excellence.
• Benchmark of how your organization's performance compares against industry standards. 
• A one hour web-conference analysis of the Organizational Performance Assessment results for your organization, conducted by a certified performance excellence coach.  
• Complete Organizational Performance Assessment results in PDF format.

The Six Disciplines Organizational Performance Assessment is now available for a limited time for $2.500.  

Get started now - satisfaction guaranteed! 

Why don’t more employees do what they are supposed to do?  

In a recent post by Banchard Leaderchat,  author and consultant William Schiemann might have part of the answer—only 14% of the organizations he polled report that their employees have a good understanding of their company’s strategy and direction.

How would your company score on a similar survey? More importantly, what would you do about it? 

A significant breakthrough in performance excellence is achievable, as research shows as much as 37% of all work-related activity doesn't contribute to an organization's strategy.
Organizations that adopt a total performance excellence program address this issue directly.  

While the Baldrige framework offers proven characteristics of world-class organizations, it doesn't provide you with an implementation model that shows you how to develop and maintain these characteristics, behaviors, and processes. 

To achieve the benefits of Baldrige faster, Six Disciplines provides the perfect compliment to the Baldrige framework, by showing you exactly how to implement a performance excellence program.  

By using Six Disciplines, you get the benefits and the value of Baldrige in one unified program: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis, and knowledge management, workforce focus, operations focus, and results. 

EXCLUSIVE:  Watch an extended interview with the CEO of a Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence award-winning organization, as he describes the journey and how Six Disciplines helped along the way. 

One of the best resources about the Baldrige Performance Excellence framework  is "Your Reference Guide to Performance Excellence" (published by NIST) which explains the benefits of Baldrige and the tools, approaches, and resources available to you.

• What Is Performance Excellence?
• What Baldrige Offers You
• What Makes Baldrige Different
• Begin Your Journey
• Benefits of Submitting a Baldrige Application
• More Learning Opportunities

Watch this video - and see how Six Disciplines can accelerate your Baldrige journey.  

On the National Baldrige Performance Excellence website, there's a great article entitled "Why Take The Baldrige Journey?"

Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to effectively and efficiently meet their missions and achieve their visions. Thousands of organizations use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide their enterprises, improve performance, and get sustainable results. This proven improvement and innovation framework offers your organization an integrated approach to key management areas:

• Leadership
• Strategic planning
• Customer focus
• Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
• Workforce focus
• Operations focus
  
• Results
  
  

Improve Your Performance

The Baldrige Criteria can be adapted to fit your unique challenges and culture and help you evaluate performance, assess where improvements or innovation are most needed, and get results. By taking the Baldrige journey, you become part of a national effort to improve America’s performance and its competitive standing in the world. You can be proud to know that your employees, customers, board members, and other stakeholders are all better off—and that America is better off.

BOTTOMLINE:   Need help implementing Baldrige criteria in your organization? Six Disciplines helps organizations implement Baldrige - faster.  Watch this short video  and contact Six Disciplines today. 

The Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, today released its seventh annual Best Companies for Leadership Study and Top 20 list. The study ranks the best companies for leadership around the globe and examines how those companies nurture talent and foster innovation in their ranks.

This year, no surprises  - General Electric topped the list, followed by Procter & Gamble, IBM, Microsoft and Coca-Cola. 

Highlights that you may find of interest from this year’s study:

• All of the Top 20 companies (vs. 68% of all other companies) say they provide structured opportunities for younger employees to promote innovative ideas
•  95% of the Top 20 companies (vs. only 51% of all other companies) report having a balanced mix of local and international talent in senior leadership positions
• 95% of the Top 20 companies (vs. just 48% of all other companies) reported that senior leaders personally spend time actively developing others
• 94% of the Top 20 companies (vs. just 49% of all other companies) say they run unprofitable projects to try new things
• 90% of the Top 20 companies (vs. 63% of all other companies) reported that if individuals have an excellent idea, they can bypass the chain of command without the threat of negative consequences

Read the entire research summary here. 

The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide a framework for understanding performance management. They reflect validated, proven best-practices against which an organization can measure itself.

Baldrige criteria has been accepted nationally (including individual states) and internationally,  as the model for performance excellence: a common language for communication among organizations for sharing best practices  

Watch this short video with Paul Worstell, (former president of PRO-TEC Coating Company and 2007 Baldrige Performance Excellence recipient) as he talks about Baldrige and Six Disciplines - with Six Disciplines founder and CEO, Gary Harpst.

In the Best Companies for Leaders survey, management consultancy Hay Group identified the top 20 best-in-class companies as well as what makes these companies known for great leadership.

Key findings of the Hay Group's research:

• When asked what organizations value the most in leaders, 83 percent of the best-in-class organizations as compared to others said “execution.”
• Organizations value leaders who can achieve results through others.
• In tough economic times, employees desire more communication and clarity around goals. They want their leaders to become more visible and to be leading from the front.
• During tough economic times, best-in-class companies create clarity, encourage development, drive accountability and recognize successful leaders.
• The top 20 best companies for leaders make leadership development a priority.

BOTTOMLINE:  What's valued most in leaders?  The ability to execute on strategy - and get the job done. Six Disciplines includes an integrated on-the-job leadership development program - Find out more. 

The Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Inc., has committed funds to sustain the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) through fiscal year 2015 - further evidence of the commitment to the long-term viability of Baldrige. 

The foundation said its support was due in part to its confidence in the ongoing development of the business and financial model by the Baldrige Enterprise, which includes BPEP, the foundation, the Alliance for Performance Excellence, and ASQ. 

BOTTOMLINE:  The Baldrige framework and criteria specifies proven characteristics of world-class excellent organizations, however, it does not provide you with an implementation model, showing you "how" to build these characteristics. It is designed to be non-prescriptive. 

The Six Disciplines Total Performance Excellence Program compliments the Baldrige framework. Six Disciplines provides you with the implementation methodology, leadership development, software, and coaching support to achieve the benefits of Baldrige -- and to get you there faster.