Organizational Performance - Reflect Excellence LLC

March 1, 2026

What If the System Is the Problem? Deming Was Right — And Here’s What Systems Leadership Looks Like

I want to tell you about a CEO I’ll call David. David’s organization was struggling with five problems: declining engagement, widespread burnout, deepening silos, stalled strategy execution, and unclear accountability. Five problems that felt urgent, distinct, and overwhelming. (See also: Your Strategy Isn’t Failing — Your Execution System Is.) (See also: The Accountability Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight.) So David […]

Organizational Performance 0 7 min read

February 15, 2026

We’ve Been Talking About Breaking Silos for Decades. They’re Getting Worse. Here’s What Actually Works.

Every organization I’ve worked with in the past decade has talked about breaking down silos. It’s on strategic plans. It’s in leadership charters. It’s in values statements. And by every available measure, silos are getting worse. Ninety-seven percent of employees and executives say silos negatively impact their organization’s performance. Fortune 500 companies lose an estimated $31.5 billion annually to silo-driven […]

Organizational Performance 0 6 min read

December 14, 2025

Culture Is Not a Feeling — It’s the Accumulation of Everything You Tolerate

A few years ago, I was driving to a client meeting, half-listening to TED Radio Hour, when Margaret Heffernan said something that made me pull over and write it down. “Culture is the accumulation of everyone’s actions.” Seven words. I sat with them for a minute. Then I turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in […]

Leadership 0 7 min read

December 7, 2025

Stop Picking One Framework and Hoping for the Best — Why the Highest-Performing Organizations Use Four

A few years ago, I was working with a mid-sized healthcare organization that had just completed a grueling Joint Commission accreditation visit. Their quality director — a smart, exhausted woman who had spent six months preparing — leaned back in her chair after the surveyors left and said, “Thank God that’s done for three years.” I didn’t say anything in […]

Organizational Performance 0 12 min read

March 29, 2021

The Baldrige Framework: Simple to Understand, Powerful When You Get the Foundation Right

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 […]

Organizational Performance 0 9 min read

March 29, 2021

Writing a Baldrige Feedback Comment

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 […]

Organizational Performance 0 14 min read

Category: Organizational Performance