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The Official Baldrige Blog

What Do CEO's and Human Resource People Have in Common?

By: Harry Hertz “The Baldrige Cheermudgeon”

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people at work
Credit: clipart.com

The Human Capital Institute (HCI) recently published the results of their member survey of top priorities for 2016. The top five priorities are:

  1.  Employee Engagement
  2.  Succession Planning
  3. . Manager as Coach / Coaching Culture
  4. . Performance Management
  5. . Workforce Planning

I was curious how this list related to the nine focus areas for CEO's and other senior executives that I gleaned from five recent studies of CEO issues as we approach 2016. The CEO's list had the following three overlap areas:

         2. Workforce Strategies

         6. Collaboration

         7. Ethics

The Workforce Strategies focus area touched on several of the HCI priorities as it discussed the needs for workforce planning and employee engagement. It specifically addressed skilled workforce needs that included diversity and inclusiveness, and the need to grow your own through student engagement, internal staff development, and community outreach. CEO's also talked about a diverse workforce and workforce planning from the perspective of needing imaginers, implementers, "all-rounders," and deep specialists. Obviously, all these diversity factors also address employee engagement.

The Collaboration focus area touched on the engagement of employees through stronger collaborations and, in particular, stronger collaborations in the C-suite. The C-suite collaboration, in addition to other benefits, engenders a coaching and succession planning environment for grooming future top leaders.

The Ethics focus area addressed the need for organizational openness, which is seen as a major driver in employee engagement and should be a factor in evaluating and managing performance in all organizations.

Looking at the priorities and focus areas from both the HCI and the CEO surveys, the only area not explicitly addressed in the current Baldrige Excellence Framework is the Manager as Coach/ Coaching Culture. Workforce development is a central part of the Workforce Engagement item (5.2) in the Baldrige Criteria, but coaching is currently only called out in an item note. Do we need to consider elevating the importance of coaching in the Baldrige Framework? Let me know what you think. And consider how well your organization is addressing all these people priorities as you enter 2016. Thanks and hope you had happy holidays!

Baldrige Excellence Framework (Criteria) and Community

About the author

Dr. Harry Hertz Photo

Harry Hertz “The Baldrige Cheermudgeon”

I am Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon, and Director Emeritus of the Baldrige Program. I joined the Program in 1992 after a decade in management in the analytical chemistry and chemical sciences laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the home of the Baldrige Program. I started my career at NIST (NBS) as a bench analytical chemist.

My favorite aspects of the Baldrige Program are: (1) the opportunity to interact with leading thinkers from all sectors of the U.S. economy who serve as volunteers in the Baldrige Program, who participate in the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program, and who represent Award applicants at the forefront of the continuous journey to performance excellence, and (2) the intellectual challenge of synthesizing ideas from leading thinkers and from personal research into Insights on the Road to Performance Excellence and other blogs that tackle challenges at the “leading edge of validated leadership and performance practice,” and contribute to the continuous revision of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework.

Outside of work I spend my time with family (including three beautiful granddaughters), exercising, baking bread, traveling, educating tomorrow’s leaders, and participating on various boards and board committees.

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Comments

Phil Wilson on January 5, 2016 9:53 AM

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Excellent points~! We applaud these two lists of target priorities.

Jim Nelson on January 5, 2016 10:32 AM

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I believe coaching IS the responsibility of every manager and critical to organizational planning. It is closely tied to a learning organization, managing knowledge assets and the learning and development system. Do we need to add it as an explicit requirement in the Baldrige Framework? Good question, I think it would help and the opposite side of the argument could be made that it is bordering prescriptive. I think a precursor question to ask is "Are best practice organizations using, leveraging and/or requiring their managers to be coaches?".

Don Swift on January 5, 2016 11:10 AM

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I have worked for many years as both the HR Director and the Quality Director for 5 organizations. I have seen up close and personal the closeness of these two disciplines working with the human capital of the organization. Leadership is the key.

Cyril Sunil on January 5, 2016 11:14 PM

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The five key identified priorities of the survey directly relates to the organisations culture and vision. Unless the leadership ( CEO / MD / Senior Leadership)spends quality management time, nothing will move forward. It about direction setting and walking on the process to achieve the goals.

harry.hertz@nist.gov on January 7, 2016 8:48 AM | Replied to

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Your comment about the role of senior leadership is in line with the Baldrige Framework and the contents of the Criteria for Performance Excellence. Category 1 is Leadership, by design, to emphasize that the system begins with leadership setting the tone and vision for the organization.

Puguh Harianto on January 6, 2016 7:51 AM

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I have worked in 'quality system area' since 30 years ago, TQC, TCC, ISO on various version, and Baldrige Criteria more than 10 years, I believe that coaching processes or mentoring processes by manager is an important thing as a part of workforce engagement.

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