Over the past forty years, I have participated in, conducted, or sponsored hundreds of team-building exercises. Most were successful and accomplished their purpose. Some were flops. But one has been requested over and over again. It consistently boosted morale and productivity. The activity? Group painting lessons. As the Administrative Services Manager for a large department in local government, I regularly […]
It’s been my experience that applicants tend to overcomplicate their responses when applying for a Baldrige-based award. This can be discouraging and is harder to communicate to staff, customers, boards, etc. And examiners — myself included — sometimes get so deep into the criteria that we forget what the framework looks like to an organization seeing it for the first […]
In October 2020, I had the privilege of hearing Tim Wise speak at the City of Tallahassee’s annual race relations summit. Wise is a prolific author and one of the most incisive thinkers on race, language, and institutional behavior in the country. He said something early in his talk that I have not stopped thinking about since: “The words you […]
Drafting your first Baldrige feedback comment is hard. Even experienced examiners sometimes stare at a blank page, knowing what they want to say but not how to structure it. And on the other side of the process, organizations receiving a feedback report often wonder how the examiner arrived at what they wrote — and what they could have put in […]
