GBMC President and CEO Recognized with Baldrige Leadership Award

President and CEO of the GBMC HealthCare System, John B. Chessare, MD, MPH, was recently presented with the 2022 Harry S. Hertz Leadership Award from the Baldrige Foundation.

The Baldrige Foundation supports organizational performance excellence in the United States and throughout the world. Awarded annually by the Baldrige Foundation, the Hertz Award recognizes outstanding leaders who have inspired, encouraged, challenged, and empowered others to achieve performance excellence. This accolade is one of four categories in the Baldrige Foundation Leadership Awards.

“This award is a further endorsement that, under Dr. Chessare’s leadership, our healthcare system has made a meaningful difference in the lives of those we have the privilege to serve, especially the most vulnerable members of our community. We are grateful for his direction, and we congratulate him on this prestigious honor,” said Fred Hudson, Chair of the GBMC HealthCare Board of Directors.

The Baldrige Foundation considers nominees from across the nation for this significant award. The nominees’ leadership and achievements are thoroughly deliberated, including how they lead their organizations and encourage their teams to achieve high performance. Their accomplishments in becoming counselors for excellence throughout the Baldrige community are also assessed.

"John is a role-model leader deeply committed to the Baldrige framework and who embodies the Baldrige leadership principles," said Al Faber, President and CEO of the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Inc. "His unwavering servant leadership style has been instrumental in the success of GBMC HealthCare in navigating the unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic."

The Baldrige Foundation created the Harry S. Hertz leadership award in 2013. It was named after Harry Hertz, the first winner, because he personified the Baldrige Core Values and Leadership Behaviors: visionary leadership, customer-focused excellence, valuing people, organizational learning and agility, managing for innovation, management by fact, societal responsibility, ethics and transparency, delivering value and results, and a systems perspective.

“I am truly honored to receive this recognition. At GBMC HealthCare, we use the science of improvement, first promulgated by W. Edwards Deming and Walter Shewhart, and now supported by the Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and the Baldrige Foundation to move faster towards our vision of becoming the community-based system of care that can deliver to every patient, every time, the care that we would want for our own loved ones,” said Chessare. “I want to thank all of my colleagues for embracing continuous improvement and the Baldrige criteria.”