How do you treat signs when you are driving your car? Are you a strict rule follower? Does a stop sign cause you to come to a full stop, or a rolling stop, or no stop at all if you see no traffic? What about that intersection you go through every day, where you never see a car approaching from any other direction? Do you begin to question the need for the stop sign? Do you just treat it as a yield sign? Do you quickly check for a traffic camera or patrol car looking to catch you?

And what do you do at yellow lights?

When I moved to Massachusetts in the 1960s, the law was that if you came to a full stop and were the second or third car at the stop sign, you did not have to stop a second time. What happened when a Massachusetts driver went to another state, not knowing their laws? Coming from New York, I was honked at a number of times when I stopped at a stop sign as the second or third car. (By the way, the Massachusetts law changed in the 1970s.)

The sign that fascinated me the most when I first moved to Massachusetts was a “maximum truck height” sign at the underpass beneath Mass(achusetts) Ave. and Memorial Drive. I can’t count the number of stuck or decapitated trucks I saw each year when school started and rental vans went under Mass Ave. Couldn’t those MIT and Harvard students read? Did they treat the sign as a dare? Did they just think the heavily loaded truck would be lower than the height restriction?

In recent years, I spend several months each year in Florida. Alongside many lakes, streams, and ponds there is a sign that says, “Don’t approach or feed the alligators.” Yet, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission reports that, from 1948 until November 2021, there were 442 alligator attacks; 26 of those resulted in human fatalities. The average is currently about seven alligator attacks per year. Yet I frequently see people getting up close for photos, or worse yet, sending their children up close for photos.

Work Signs

This may all be interesting to you, but what, you may wonder, does it have to do with you, a good, law-abiding citizen? You always obey those posted signs.

Well, do you obey obvious signs at work? Let me give a few examples, and I hope to give you (and your team) an opportunity for some introspection.

• Do you have organizational values? Do your leaders demonstrate them in their personal actions? Are they understood and practiced by employees?
• Do you start all problem solving with some form of root cause analysis (RCA)? Or do you assume you know the solution without doing RCA? If so, consider reading my recent blog about the A3 problem-solving tool and the temptation to “jump to box 7.”
• What about those pesky customer complaints? Do you try to avert the eyes of a potentially upset customer? Do you solve their problem by referring them to someone else? Or do you solve the problem, enter it into a knowledge management system, and then have staff who aggregate the problems and look for solutions to avoid them in the future?
• Does your organization have a robust strategic planning process? Do you create strategic plans that sit on a shelf and are never converted to actions with accountability? Do you have a process for modifying plans if conditions change, and can you smoothly transition your action planning (think organizational resilience)?
• Does your organization find it easier to blame people rather than processes? When something goes wrong, do you first look at possible process failures or for the people who were responsible?
• And how about providing beneficial, constructive feedback to colleagues or subordinates in real-time? Are you a supervisor who waits for that dreaded annual performance review time?
• Do you have a process for identifying strategic opportunities and intelligent risks, leading to opportunities for innovation (again, think organizational resilience)? Do you have a process for stopping work on an unsuccessful innovation and thanking the people who took the risk?
• Do you have a great process for continuous, incremental process improvement and think that will substitute for discontinuous, significant innovation?
• Finally, do you focus on opportunities for improvement, but ignore the many opportunities for celebration?

Do you have a healthy organizational culture or a toxic workplace? Addressing some of the challenges above, where they exist, might be part of creating a healthier culture and a more engaged workforce. The Baldrige Excellence Builder® and the Baldrige Excellence Framework® ask you important questions that will help you improve organizational performance in all the areas addressed above and more.

Give these workplace signs some thought! Oh, and obey the law when you are out on the road!

BIO:

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.