Q&A with Wanda Sturm

The American Society for Quality’s Wanda Sturm talks about a business tool every leader in your city should consider using.

You’re one of the ASQ examiners who help the National Institute of Standards and Technology administer the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Is that a big deal?
The award—named after the 26th Secretary of Commerce—was established by the US Congress in 1987 to recognize US companies that have implemented successful quality management programs. It’s the nation’s highest presidential honor for performance excellence.

Deciding who gets the award revolves around something called the Baldrige Framework. What is that?
It has eleven core values or principles, and those core values and principles then are divided up into seven criteria for performance excellence. It starts out with leadership. Leadership is the most critical piece of driving the company forward, but leadership can’t do everything. So leadership is aligned and integrated with strategic planning and also with customer focus. And by looking at those three things together, leadership is able to better talk about where they’re going, why they’re going that direction, how they’re going to get there, and the impact that is going to have on specific customer segments.

What else does the framework do?
It looks at these three things separately but then collectively, too, at how leadership focuses on a company’s strategy and on its customers. Then that is integrated with three other key areas: workforce, operations, and what systems are in place to measure, conduct analysis, and manage knowledge. All six of the criteria produce (business) results, the seventh criterion.

Although the framework was designed as a business management tool, can it also be applied to local government?
Absolutely. It’s more commonly used in business, but it’s also gained popularity with health care and education. I think it would be excellent for a city to take this and use it just to make some improvements. This is a great structure to use to do that. One of the beauties of Baldrige is that it’s done at the national level, it’s done at a state level, but then you can even take it and use it internally as an approach to how you want to go about improvement in your organization.

Why is leadership such a critical piece in this process?
You need leaders who can state their mission and their vision. As an examiner, one of the key things I look for is how well that is understood throughout whatever entity I am assessing. If I were to walk into Walla Walla city hall and talk to the mayor and the administrator and ask, ‘What is your mission? What’s your purpose? What are you guys trying to accomplish?’ they would tell me something, and then I could go ask someone in a different department the same question, and they would basically say the same thing; it may not be the same words, but it’s the same meaning. What you realize about that is that your leadership has had a great two-way conversation with their workforce.

How would using the Baldrige Framework be different for cities than with businesses?
In government, leaders are elected to positions, and typically they will bring in new people to fill roles; then, even though some of the specifics would change associated with where the city is going and what the direction is, what doesn’t change is who your customers are. Applying the framework would be one way to have a good transition from one administration to another.

Can the Baldrige Framework be used to help manage a crisis like the pandemic?
Absolutely. Even though this wasn’t developed specifically for responding to a crisis, it does ask you to talk about your organization and its key characteristics, your operational relationships, your customers, and your stakeholders. What’s really good about Baldrige is that the criteria are constantly being updated; the latest criteria even include information about dealing with Covid in terms of your workforce and having people work virtually or remotely. I think the best thing about Baldrige is that it’s not prescriptive: It doesn’t tell you what you have to do; it asks you [to articulate and measure] how you do these things.

Anything else about this whole topic of leadership, and Baldrige and excellence, you want to leave with city leaders?
I would like to see more cities consider this. I think it can make a big difference, not only for the communities they serve but for the people who are working for the city. It really helps them look at things from an overall systems perspective. It’s just a different way to meet people where they are and to give them the information that they need.