IMC RBNQA: Leaders need to focus on a Moving Target

The IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award criteria are a clone of the Baldrige model.

While, apart from business, the Baldrige has made deep inroads into the healthcare and education sectors; the IMC RBNQA is still at the starting blocks for healthcare and education. The RBNQA’s footprints are visible primarily in manufacturing and service businesses.

What are the main benefits from adopting the RBNQA criteria? A habit of change. A habit of proactive change.

Where does the change start? At the top. Leaders have to walk the change they want to see in others….others in their organization.

Who defines the change? The customer. Customer expectations are a moving target, based on how competitors pamper them.

Leaders who understand the change expected by customers know how to factor these goal in their strategy. They also know that the life of any change is shrinking….from years to months; and now even weeks.

Therefore, a key responsibility of leaders should be to proactively meet customers and to empathetically listen to their voices. This should become one of the  core competencies of organizations adopting the RBNQA criteria. They need to outgrow out-sourcing this requirement to market research agencies who can at best provide a post-mortem report. No one understands customers better than the residents of an organization.

Patients in hospitals are also customers. As are students in educational institutions.