High performing organizations are focused on learning — learning new and innovative ways of accomplishing tasks and adding value; exploring and learning how to improve processes; personal learning and development of their leaders and teams; learning best practices and benchmarking new approaches from other organizations.  After all, organizational learning is a Baldrige Core Value, and continuous learning really never ends!  This session is intended for organizations that already use Baldrige to explore new ways of using the Framework to accelerate their continuous improvement and performance excellence efforts.

The Performance Excellence Network — in partnership with the Wisconsin Center for Performance Excellence & the Iowa Quality Center — is pleased to announce a powerful workshop: Continuing the Journey to Excellence: Advanced Baldrige Techniques — April 10 from 9AM-12PM.  The workshop will be hosted in person (Mystic Lake Conference Center in Prior Lake, MN) and is a pre-conference workshop to igniteEX 2025 conference. You can attend the workshop ala carte or you can attend the workshop (9AM-12PM) and the main conference (Apr 10 1PM-5PM, then all day Apr 11). It will be facilitated by Dr. JoAnn Sternke, owner of Leader Excellence LLC (and former Superintendent of Pewaukee Schools) and Karen Kiel Rosser, VP and Chief Quality & Strategy Officer Mary Greeley Medical Center.  Both facilitators have been in senior leader roles with organizations that have received the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, guiding their organizations for many years to achieve true world class performance levels.

The Baldrige Framework provides a systems perspective for continuous improvement and achieving performance excellence. It reflects the “leading edge of validated management practice,” against which any organization or community can measure itself to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities.  This workshop is intended for leaders within organizations who are already familiar with and using Baldrige — perhaps already have completed an assessment or two — but are interested in sustaining or accelerating excellence efforts, broadening internal awareness and engagement, and achieving ever better results.

The workshop will focus on areas such as:

• How to build awareness, commitment, engagement of excellence throughout the organization
• Different ways to structure a Baldrige-based excellence effort — how to organize teams, mobilize resources, set an organizational cadence for assessment and improvement
• How to build an application that captures your organization’s story, creating “line of sight” from your organizational context to processes to results
• How to interpret, analyze, and take action on Opportunities for Improvement (OFIs), prioritizing and focusing on key areas to improve
• How to navigate challenges, resistance, and “excellence fatigue”
• How to maximize Return on Investment in using Baldrige, and how to integrate it with other useful improvement methods and tools

The session is highly interactive and helps participants identify ways to improve the already good excellence approaches they have in place — to give that proverbial “shot in the arm” for organizations and communities on the journey to excellence.

The session will be hosted at Mystic Lake Conference Center, Prior Lake, MN on April 10 from 9:00AM-12:00PM.  Lunch is included.

Investment is $200 for members ($400 for non-members).  No group discounts available for this workshop, as space is limited and it WILL sell out!  Members: use the discount code “member25” to get the 50% discount!!

Explore how to sustain or accelerate your journey to excellence!

Facilitator Biographies

Dr. JoAnn Sternke

JoAnn is a true ambassador for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program. She was the Superintendent of Schools in the Pewaukee School District, located near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 2001 to 2017. JoAnn led the Pewaukee School District to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2013.  But it gets better….how many people can say they have worked for TWO Baldrige recipient organizations?  JoAnn then served as a Senior Leader and Coach at Studer Education, a division of Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige award recipient. Here she helped organizations throughout the US “get better at getting better.” Now JoAnn has formed Leader Excellence and is helping organizations utilize the Baldrige framework to reach new heights of excellence.

JoAnn knows the Baldrige framework inside and out. She has served on the Panel of Judges for both the Baldrige National Quality Program as well as the Wisconsin and Minnesota programs. She was honored to be the recipient of the 2019 Baldrige Foundation Harry S. Hertz Leadership Award.  A sought-after speaker, JoAnn is called on both nationally and internationally to speak about performance excellence. Additionally, she is a current Master Examiner for the national program and loves to go on site visits to both offer feedback and learn herself.

Karen Kiel-Rosser

Karen Kiel Rosser serves as the Vice President & Quality Improvement Officer for Mary Greeley Medical Center. She is responsible for overall quality improvement and organizational excellence at the medical center. Kiel Rosser spearheaded the development and implementation of a system-wide framework for performance excellence utilizing criteria from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program as well as the tools of lean and six sigma.

Her positions prior to joining Mary Greeley include Vice President of Performance Excellence and Managed Care at Agnesian HealthCare, an integrated health care delivery system in Fond du Lac, WI, Network Development Director at Humana Health Plan in Milwaukee, WI, and Ambulatory Clinic Manager at Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee, WI. Kiel Rosser holds a Master’s Degree in Health Care Administration from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Public Relations from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She serves as an examiner for the National Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award program and is a coach and lead judge for the Iowa Recognition for Performance Excellence (the states Baldrige-equivalent program). She is a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and is a member of the Ames Morning Rotary Club, a past board member for the United Way of Story County, and a participant in Leadership Ames (class XXIV) program.