We kicked off the 2016 Quality Award cycle with two-day examiner training on April 18-19 and April 25-26. Nearly 100 volunteers joined us at our office in Columbia to dive into the Baldrige Excellence Framework and understand how to apply the application review process to write actionable feedback.
EiMF CEO Sherry Marshall opened the training by telling examiners how being an examiner had changed her career and thanked the examiners for their service to the program.
“It’s the hearts of volunteers and incredible work ethic that has made this program successful for more than 20 years,” she said before turning the training over to presenters and long-time examiners Eunice Halverson and Anita Marx.
Halverson echoed Marshall’s sentiments by adding, “Being a part of this process is better than any master’s class I took and can be applied at everything you do.”
During the two-day training, Halverson and Marx taught examiners how to:
- Review an application
- Write comments
- Analyze linkages between categories
- Understand how process improvement should work
- Define ethics, roles, awards process, deliverables and next steps
When polled to see if anyone’s organization was doing as well as it should be, no hands went up. An employee from a recent Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner summed it up best with, “Never stop improving.”
“If you don’t bring back at least one idea to implement to improve performance at your own company, we have failed,” said Marx. “This is the Gold Standard for Performance Excellence, and you will all have skills 99 percent of people don’t.”
Examiners spent the next two days studying the characteristics of high-performing organizations and how the Baldrige Excellence Framework connects the dots.
Interested in becoming a Quality Award Examiner? Learn more on our Volunteer page: https://excellenceinmo.org/be-a-volunteer/.
