Pictured above: Debbie Collard, Seasons Leadership co-founder, and E. David Spong, our resident seasoned leader, in between former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Don Evans and the former President of the United States George W. Bush, receiving the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for service.

It can be difficult as a leader to know where to start on a journey to excellence. You may ask yourself: “Where are the biggest pain points? Where will I get the most benefit from investing my time and energy? Or how do I know what’s most important and impactful?” Each of these are great questions. But what if you had a map for your journey to excellence? You do! And you may not even be aware of it.

Last week I received an email from the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program announcing a free business resource called, “The Foundations for a Successful Business.” I just had to share it with the Seasons Leadership community: www.nist.gov/baldrige/self-assessing/improvement-tools/foundations-successful-business

Why Baldrige? Let me provide some background. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a long-time supporter of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. I implemented the performance excellence framework in multiple organizations, resulting in several state and international awards, twice including the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Nation’s highest honor for performance excellence, once in manufacturing and once in service. I also served as an examiner and senior examiner for the program and served on the Baldrige Foundation board of directors for 15 years and was the first female chair of the board.

Because of all this exposure and involvement with the Baldrige Program, I believe in the Baldrige approach to excellence. Also, there are decades of proven results in any type of business to back that belief. You can see for yourself at www.nist.gov/baldrige.

With our Seasons Leadership Vision to make excellent leadership the world-wide standard and our Mission to inspire and partner with individuals, teams and organizations to increase and accelerate leadership excellence, we are always on the lookout for things that will help us realize our vision and mission. Because we believe in leadership excellence, we are always looking for tools that will help increase and accelerate that excellence.

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program provides several tools that can help an organization get started and advance on their own journey to excellence, including the Baldrige Excellence Framework ^® and the Baldrige Excellence Builder ^®. Both of these tools can help a business be successful at any stage; new or well-established, growing, or transforming.

The new tool, Foundations for a Successful Business, is based on the Baldrige Framework and introduces the basic elements for sustaining, growing, and managing an organization. I am so excited about this because it provides a workbook-like set of questions for leaders to ponder in an easy-to-use online format. Users can also easily navigate to the areas of the framework they are most interested in assessing and improving (i.e., leadership, strategy, etc.). This tool makes it so easy to figure out where to focus when starting on your journey to excellence. Helpful hint: Leadership is always a great starting point.

We believe in helping to spread Leadership Excellence world-wide and this free tool can help any business get started on their journey to excellence. I encourage you to check it out and get started today! What are you waiting for?

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Would you like to learn more about how leadership excellence can help you or your business? Contact us today!

Get more exclusive advice from our Resident Seasoned Leader E. David Spong – also a two-time Baldrige Award leader:

‍Balancing Business Needs with Loyalty- Patreon Exclusive!‍

‍Knowing Your Priority-Patreon Exclusive!‍

‍Making Practicing Gratitude a Habit-Patreon Exclusive!‍

‍Want to learn more about Baldrige? Get the book written by E. David Spong and Debbie Collard that describes their Baldrige Journey: “The Making of a World-Class Organization.”