Abstract:

The organisations involved in the European model of excellence management of the EFQM-European Foundation for Quality Management, define, develop and apply the concept of “leadership” as a substantial element of its management system, placing it the first in the order of their enumeration not as a matter of chance but giving it a symbolic position of being, the initial step of every analysis as “criterion 1” as it is the human impulse of every organisational movement.
The model determines that excellent organisations have leaders who shape the future and make the projects and visions happen. They act as role models for the values and ethics of the organisation inspiring workers to follow the culture and creating a trust ambience at all times. They are flexible, enabling the organisation to anticipate and react in a timely manner, by making change easier in order to ensure the ongoing success of the organisation. According to the directions suggested by the guide provided by the Foundation, which should be followed in the memoirs presented for its external assessment, leadership strategies and the implication of their leaders for the good government and the excellence in management should be defined in a concrete way, based on the RADAR matrix of the areas: Results, Approach, Deployment, Assessment and Review.
The organisations involved in the improvement of quality management compare themselves with other similar organisations and try to learn from those that obtain the best marks in order to identify improvement areas and set learning and innovation actions for being more competitive and improve continuously.
In this paper we quest the quality system of the criteria and criteria parts in order to find out the relevance of the area of management leadership in the education organisations of The Basque Country, this is, we pick up the benchmark of those who have achieved to implant the excellence model of EFQM management and obtained the correspondent award and recognisance by Euskalit,-The Basque Foundation for Quality in order to try to extract some knowhow and knowledge from their way of organizing their activity to serve as a successful reference for other organisations of the sector.
For the purpose of this study we have selected a sample of educational organisations of the Basque Country that have been awarded prizes for their excellence management by Euskalit. Hence, we select the organisations that have obtained the highest punctuations in the criterion parts related to the area of leadership of the EFQM model as stated above, in order to study the benchmark and try to understand the influence of the area of leadership in the general results of excellent organisations. Moreover, we study the role of leadership taking into account the level of performance achieved in the assessment of the foundation, analysing the rest of the variables and their relations with the strong points and the areas of improvement identified on these organisations.

Keywords:

Leadership, quality management, EFQM, innovation, education organization.