The Girl Scouts Women of Distinction are committed to increasing the impact of the Girl Scouts by volunteering and financial giving. Leaders are chosen by their dedication of service and leadership. This year’s Girl Scouts Women of Distinction is Faye Wilson Tate.

Fay Wilson Tate is the vice president and director for Global Diversity and Inclusion at CH2M HILL. CH2M HILL is a global engineering consulting firm.

The Girl Scouts’ program has played a role in Tate’s community stewardship as she was a Girl Scout herself. The Girl Scouts also teach respect, teamwork, friendship and inclusion.

2012, is the Girl Scouts’ 100^th anniversary. And as so Girl Scouts Colorado has named 100 Colorado Girl Scouts, Generation WOW! The Generation WOW honor is given to girls who have exhibited a high level of volunteer achievement and made significant contributions to their community; demonstrated strong leadership skills; participated in a service learning project; promoted healthy attitude, both in mind and body; demonstrated exceptional interpersonal skills in teamwork, conflict resolution and goal setting; and embody the Girl Scout Promise and Law.

The Girl Scouts’ impact on girls and youth is endlessly positive with several girls being able to articulately share their Girl Scout learning experiences. This is evident in Generation WOW girls―Kaycee Bischoff and Cristina Trimpe and all of Girl Scout troop 4145.

To be part of the Girl Scouts and this up-coming centennial year visit, www.girlscouts.com.

Girl Scouts Declares 2012 the Year of the Girl (prnewswire.com)

Jeanne Brown, Chair of the Board of Rocky Mountain Performance Excellence (RMPEx) helps organizations improve performance and achieve results through the Baldridge criteria. She is a quality management and performance excellence professional with more than 30 years of leadership experience in the high technology and utilities industries. Three simple steps to freedom are defining, writing down, and keeping current the process. Robert Galvin of Motorola said, “To get the process exactly right is going to be cheaper and it is going to be better.” He received one of the first Malcolm Baldrige Awards. “Common knowledge grows the entire organization towards the goal of excellence,” say Brown. This can be accomplished by having a central repository that is accessible to anyone. The bottom line is that, “taking time, money and materials out of the process and streamlining them but still maintaining a high level of quality and service for customers will increase profits,” Brown.

These 12 steps are good reasons to document, provided by Jeanne Brown:

Establishes a Baseline from which to improve - this creates a point of reference for where you are now and which direction you need to go to improve your process.
Streamlines and standardizes training - when the process is clearly defined, training is easy, and everybody is doing the job the same way.
Keeps everyone current - in a document control system, there is revision control that assures everyone is using the most recent document.
Captures subject matter expertise for the benefit of all – it is important to capture expertise from knowledgeable individuals.
Assures smoother transition during change - proper documents provide a stable foundation when people move to other jobs or organizations.
Frees up time & energy for innovation & creativity - once you have the basic directions, you and others will be able to look at ways to move forward rather than spend time learning the basics over and over.
7. Reduces and eliminates redundancy - documenting the process helps to identify places where there may be duplicated efforts or steps.
Identifies and fills in any gaps in the current process - as you document, you may discover places where things might drop through the cracks.
Clearly defines resource requirements - defining responsibilities in the documents helps everyone know exactly what the job requires.
Reduces risk on the job - clearly defined processes lead to concise and useful training, which helps to reduce the risk to the employee.
Provides a document change history for future reference - the document control system will provide a method to research a past event and determine the process that was being used at that time.
Offers a one-stop-shop for an organization’s work activities - the central location for controlled documents allows for cross-function learning and sharing.

For more information, visit:

http://www.coloradoexcellence.org/

http://www.baldrigepe.org

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