80 Critical Questions

The Baldrige Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization
functions. If you cannot do a full assessment, here are 10 critical questions for each area
addressed by the Criteria that can help you uncover opportunities for improving your
management system.

Answer each question as completely and accurately as possible. If the process you describe is not
systematic, effective, well-deployed, regularly improved, and aligned with what your
organization is trying to accomplish, you have an opportunity for improvement. If your results do
not show positive trends and/or good current performance or do not compare well to
benchmarks, you have an opportunity for improvement.

Answer all of the questions that follow and you will gain a very good picture of the state of your
management system.

10 Critical Questions:

 Your Organization
 Senior Leadership
 Strategic Planning
 Your Customers
 Data, Information, and Knowledge
 Your Workforce
 Process Management
 Results
  Your Organization

1. What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture?

2. What are your organization’s core competencies?

3. How do your core competencies relate to your mission?

4. What are the key factors that motivate your employees?

5. What are the key requirements and expectations for each customer group you serve?

6. How do you communicate and manage relationships with suppliers, partners, and

collaborators?

7. What principal factors determine your success relative to your competitors?

8. What changes are affecting your competitive situation?

9. What are the key available sources of comparative data within and outside your industry?

10. What are your key strategic challenges and advantages?

Sr Leadership

1. How do senior leaders set and deploy your organization’s vision and values?

2. How do their personal actions reflect their commitment to these values?

3. How do senior leaders personally promote legal and ethical behavior?

4. How do they create a sustainable organization?

5. How do they create an environment for performance improvement and leadership,

accomplishing your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, organizational agility,

and organizational and workforce learning?

 6. How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce, including

two-way communication and communicating key decisions?

7. How do senior leaders create a focus on action to accomplish your organization’s

objectives, improve performance, and attain your vision?

8. What performance measures do they regularly review to identify needed actions?

9. How do you evaluate the performance of senior leaders?

10. How do they use their performance reviews to further their development, improve their

personal leadership effectiveness, and improve the performance of the leadership system?

Strategic planning

1. How do you conduct strategic planning including the key strategic planning process steps

and participants in the process?

2. How do you identify potential blind spots during this process?

3. How do you ensure that strategic planning addresses: (a) your organization’s strengths,

weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); (b) potential major shifts in technology,

markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; (c)

long-term organizational sustainability; and (d) your ability to execute the strategic plan?

4. What are your current strategic objectives, the goals for each, and the timetable for

achieving them?

5. How do these objectives address your strategic challenges and advantages, opportunities

for innovation, core competencies, and the needs of all stakeholders?

6. How do you develop and deploy action plans to achieve your strategic objectives?
 7. How do you ensure that financial, human, and other resources are available to support the

accomplishment of your action plans?

8. How do you establish and deploy modified action plans as circumstances change?

9. What are your key human resource plans to accomplish your strategic objectives?

10. What measures do you use to track the achievement and effectiveness of your action

plans?

Your Customers

1. What are your key customer groups or market segments and what does each

group/segment require of your organization?

2. How do you determine which groups/segments to serve?

3. How do you determine the requirements of each group/segment?

4. How do you identify and innovate products, programs, and/or services to meet these

requirements and exceed expectations?

5. How do you support your products, programs, and/or services and enable your customers

to seek information and utilize them?

6. How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer

experience and contributes to customer engagement?

7. How do you build and manage relationships with your customers?

8. How do you listen to your customers to get feedback on your products, programs,

services, and support, including managing complaints and determining customer

dissatisfaction?
 9. How do you determine customer satisfaction and engagement, including satisfaction with

your competitors or other benchmarks?

10. How do you use the customer information described in answers to the questions above to

evaluate current and future customer groups and their requirements and to build a more

customer-focused culture?

Data Information and Knowledge

1. How do you select and collect the data and information you use to track (1) daily

operations and (2) overall organizational performance, and how do you align and

integrate these data?

2. What are your key organizational performance measures?

3. How do you select and use comparative data and information to provide benchmarks for

these measures and to support decision making and innovation?

4. How do you review organizational performance and capabilities, including competitive

performance and progress on your strategic objectives and action plans?

5. What analyses do you perform to support these reviews and to ensure that the conclusions

of these reviews are valid?

6. How do you translate the findings from these reviews into priorities for continuous and

breakthrough improvement and into opportunities for innovation, and how do you deploy

these priorities throughout your organization?

7. How do you ensure the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security,

confidentiality, availability, and accessibility of your organizational data, information,

and knowledge?
 8. How do you manage organizational knowledge to collect and transfer workforce

knowledge, transfer knowledge to and from stakeholders, assemble and transfer relevant

knowledge to your strategic planning process, and rapidly identify, share, and implement

best practices.

9. How do you ensure that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user friendly?

10. How do you ensure the continued availability of hardware and software systems and the

continued availability of data and information in an emergency?

Your workforce

1. How do you determine the key factors that affect workforce engagement and satisfaction

and assess performance on them?

2. How does your culture promote open communication, high-performance work, and an

engaged workforce?

3. How does your organization benefit from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your

workforce?

4. How does your workforce performance management system engage employees and

support high-performance work?

5. How does your learning and development system address your organization’s core

competencies and strategic challenges, action plans, performance improvement,

innovation, ethics, employees’ needs, knowledge transfer, and reinforcing new

knowledge and skills on the job?

6. How do you manage career progression and succession planning?

 7. How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs including skills,

competencies, and staffing levels, and prepare your workforce for changing needs?

8. How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new employees?

9. How do you manage and organize your workforce to accomplish the work of your

organization?

10. How do you ensure, improve, and measure performance on workforce health, safety, and

security, and how do you support employees through policies, services, and benefits?

Process Management

1. How do you design and innovate your overall work system (how the work of your

organization is accomplished)?

2. How do your work systems and key work processes (your most important internal value

creation processes) relate to and capitalize on your core competencies?

3. What are your key work processes?

4. How do you determine the key requirements for these processes and what are they?

5. How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet these requirements?

6. How do you ensure that the day-to-day operation of these processes meets their key

process requirements?

7. What are the key performance measures and in-process measures used to control and

improve these processes?

8. How do you control the overall costs of your work processes and prevent defects, service

errors, and rework?

 9. How do you improve your work processes to improve performance, reduce variability,

and improve products, services, programs, and/or outcomes?

10. How are work process improvements and lessons learned shared with other units and

processes to drive learning and innovation?

Results

1. Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR

health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional

status?

2. Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction, dissatisfaction, relationship

building, and engagement?

3. Financial performance?

4. Market or marketplace performance?

5. Workforce engagement and satisfaction?

6. Workforce and leader development?

7. The operational performance of your work systems and key work processes?

8. Regulatory and legal compliance and ethical behavior?

9. For each of these measures, how does your organization’s performance compare to that

of your competitors and other organizations with similar products, services, or programs?

10. How do these results address your organization’s important customer; product, service,

program, and/or offering; market; process; and action plan performance requirements?