About
We’ve been inside the organizations we now serve.
Organizations don’t fail because their people aren’t trying hard enough. They fail because the systems those people work inside (the way decisions get made, the way strategy gets communicated, the way accountability gets defined) weren’t built for the challenges they’re facing now.
Reflect Excellence LLC was founded in 2021 to help organizations see themselves clearly and act on what they find. We work with leaders in state and local government, mission-driven nonprofits and other public-purpose organizations to strengthen the systems that drive performance: leadership, strategy, workforce engagement and operational excellence.
Our approach is grounded in the Baldrige Excellence Framework, the national standard for organizational performance. But frameworks don’t change organizations. Leaders do. That’s why everything we offer, from strategic planning to leadership development to organizational training, is built to give leaders practical tools they can use right away, not theories they’ll forget by next quarter.
What makes Reflect Excellence different
A cadence built for self-sufficiency
Six-week sprints, weekly working sessions, monthly status reviews and quarterly offsites. We build the rhythm with your team, then hand it over. When you’re ready to apply for a Sterling or Baldrige award, you do it without us.
See the cadence →Plain-language Baldrige, paced for action
One concept at a time, with complexity added only as your team’s grasp deepens. Leaders leave with tools they can use, not vocabulary they can repeat.
A practitioner’s perspective
More than 35 years inside public-purpose organizations, not outside looking in.
We don’t sell inspiration.
We build capability.
Gordon Klein, Founder
Gordon Klein brings more than 35 years of public service experience across leadership development, strategic planning, budgeting, finance, information technology, process improvement and organizational training. He founded Reflect Excellence in 2021 to put that experience to work for local governments and mission-driven organizations.
Gordon serves on the Board of Directors of the Sterling Council and is a Sterling Master Examiner, evaluating organizations that seek recognition as role models of performance excellence. He was invited to help extend the Sterling Leadership Development curriculum.
As a speaker and instructor, including internationally, Gordon teaches practical, research-backed programs on leadership, accountability, strategic thinking and organizational performance. He writes regularly on this site, on LinkedIn and on YouTube.
From the inside: what the work produced
Before founding Reflect Excellence, Gordon spent his career inside the kind of organizations we now serve. A few results from that work:
Sterling Award, then sustained
His department won the Governor’s Sterling Award from the Sterling Council, Florida’s Baldrige-based performance excellence program, then earned Sterling’s Sustained Excellence recognition three years later, while absorbing another department that grew its staff by more than half.
3× output, $1M+ a year
A sewer crew came back from lean training proposing pipe bursting in place of trenching. Piloted for a quarter against the other crews, then adopted: three laterals a day instead of one, and more than $1 million a year saved in repaving. Gordon sponsored the pilot. The idea was the crew’s.
80% of reports retired
Six months before replacing a mainframe financial system, his team stopped sending its reports unless someone asked. About four in five were never requested, and none of them were rebuilt.
0.89 vs. 0.29
The industry held that water use follows rainfall. Fifty years of a utility’s data put rainfall’s correlation at 0.29 and temperature’s at 0.89. Revenue projections were rebuilt on the driver that actually moved.
20 years of duplicate paper
A police evidence room kept three filing cabinets of forms duplicating a database in use for two decades. Staff had argued against them for years. An audit got them removed, and the line at the evidence window shrank.
A strength leaders couldn’t see
Writing an award application turned up an ISO-certified environmental management system, with root-cause training, improvement teams and quarterly audits, that several senior leaders were sure did not exist, because their own divisions had never taken part.
Since founding Reflect Excellence
Three leaders, three answers
Working with a client’s senior and executive leaders on mission, vision, values and strategy, Gordon asked one question: who is the primary customer of your annual strategic plan? Three senior leaders gave three different answers, and the senior managers’ votes spread across every option. The leaders took it from there. Their stakeholders were named and brought into planning, every action plan named who was responsible and who was affected, and leaders whose work depended on each other settled what each expected of the other, which removed a good deal of work done twice or done for nobody. They still send Gordon their draft and final plan every year.
Most of what a self-assessment finds is already known by somebody inside. Our work is making it visible, and acting on it.