The following article, originally published in the October 21, 2016 online edition of PA Times, is 

reprinted with the permission of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA).

Improving Government Performance: 

The Great Promise of the Baldrige Excellence Framework

By Christine Schaefer

When you hear the word Baldrige, what comes to mind?

• A prestigious national award launched in the 1980s to advance U.S. manufacturers’ 

global competitiveness

• A brilliant, unorthodox U.S. secretary of commerce during Ronald Reagan’s presidential 

administration

• A misspelled word (shouldn’t it be Baldridge?)

If you chose one of the first two answers above, you already know two things about one of the 

most unique—and evolving—programs in the federal government. Changes in the Baldrige 

Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) over the past decade have given it the capacity to offer 

U.S. government organizations a promising and proven means of improving performance and 

achieving customer-focused excellence.

Basic Facts about the Baldrige Program

Housed within the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and 

Technology (NIST), BPEP manages the nation’s only presidential award for organizational 

excellence. The Baldrige Award honors U.S. businesses as well as nonprofit, health care, and 

education organizations that demonstrate excellent performance in seven key areas:

1. Leadership

2. Strategy

3. Customers

4. Knowledge management and performance measurement

5. Workforce

6. Operations

7. Results

The 29-year-old program was named after the late U.S. commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige. 

Supported by a unique public-private partnership that includes a nonprofit foundation, the 

federal program annually trains a large volunteer corps (500-plus in some years) of 
competitively selected experts in multiple professional fields and sectors throughout the 

country. Called Baldrige examiners, these volunteers conduct assessments and provide 

feedback to Baldrige Award applicants to help them improve their performance. Other 

volunteer experts serve on the Baldrige Program’s panel of judges, reviewing finalists for the 

annual award in order to help the U.S. secretary of commerce select the recipients.

Today, BPEP continues to offer as its key resource the Baldrige Excellence Framework, which 

includes the Criteria for Performance Excellence and has set the worldwide standard for 

organizational excellence. The Baldrige framework booklets, available in three sector-specific 

versions, include a comprehensive and regularly revised set of assessment criteria that enable 

organizations to assess and improve processes and results using a systems perspective. 

Adopting this leadership and management framework and using the assessment criteria have 

helped thousands of U.S. organizations of wide-ranging sectors and sizes improve their 

performance and support their long-term success.

How Baldrige Grew to Support Nonprofits

The following events enabled the Baldrige Program to more fully support excellence in publicsector organizations:

• In 2004, congressional legislation authorized the Baldrige Program to expand award 

eligibility to nonprofit organizations beyond education and health care, including 

government agencies and subunits.

• In 2006, NIST’s fiscal year appropriation provided the Baldrige Program with additional 

funding to move forward with the expansion to fully serve the nonprofit sector. That 

work included revising the business version of the Criteria for Performance Excellence to 

make the requirements fully relevant to nonprofit organizations and running a pilot 

award process in which Baldrige examiners assessed a nonprofit organization.

• Beginning in 2007, all nonprofit organizations, including those in the public sector, could 

apply for the Baldrige Award. (Note: Nonprofit health care and education organizations 

had been eligible to apply since 1999.)
• From 2007 through 2016, 82 nonprofit organizations have applied for the Baldrige 

Award, and seven nonprofits have received it, including two municipal governments and 

two federal units that are part of U.S. military and veterans organizations. (Note: For the 

2016 award cycle, recipients will be named in November.)

Value to the Public Sector

Why do government organizations choose to embark on a journey of improvement using the 

Baldrige framework? Consider the response of Michael Levinson, former city manager of Coral 

Springs, Florida, who led the city when it became one of the first government organizations to 

earn a Baldrige Award:

“People ask, ‘Why Baldrige?’ My answer is very simple: triple-A bond rating on Wall Street from 

all three rating agencies, bringing capital projects in on time and within budget, a 96 percent 

business satisfaction rating, a 94 percent resident satisfaction rating, an overall quality rating of 

95 percent, and an employee satisfaction rating of 97 percent . . . that’s why we’re involved 

with Baldrige.”

Similarly, Dr. Joseph A. Lannon, director of the first federal Baldrige Award recipient, U.S. Army 

Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), said his organization 

adopted the Baldrige criteria “in order to become the best organization we can possibly be and 

provide the best products and support we can to the U.S. warfighter.”

The framework is scalable for use by organizations of any size. Whether one is a small 

government department or a large agency, an organization can use the resource as a basis for 

improving the effectiveness and efficiency of its operations as well as develop systematic and 

innovative processes to strengthen leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, knowledge 

management and performance measurement, and workforce engagement.

Municipal and state government organizations in states such as California, Florida, Kansas, 

Tennessee, and Texas have been discovering these benefits over the past decade. Many have 

received awards from their regional or state-level Baldrige-based programs, and some may 
eventually apply for the Baldrige Award to receive more feedback on their performance and 

gain the opportunity to earn national recognition for their achievements.

In the meantime, the four government organizations that have earned the Baldrige Award 

between 2007 and 2015 provide role models for others in the public sector that wish to 

perform at the highest levels possible to serve residents in every U.S. community.

Author: Christine Schaefer has been a staff member of the Baldrige Performance Excellence 

Program since 2005. A writer-editor, she has served as a team leader for the past three years, 

supporting the management of publications, communications, award process and other 

assessment activities, and training. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia 

in political and social thought and a master’s degree from Georgetown University, where her 

coursework and thesis focused on social and public policy issues.