• Leadership – Leaders guide and sustain the organization and addresses its ethical, legal, and community responsibilities.
  
  
• Strategic Planning – The organization develops and deploys strategic objectives and action plans, and progress is measured.
  
  
• Customer and Market Focus – The organization determines requirements, needs, and expectations of customers and markets.
  
  
• Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management – The organization selects, gathers, analyzes, manages, and improves its data, information, and knowledge assets to support key organization processes and the organization reviews and uses reviews to improve its performance.
  
  
• Workforce Focus – The organization engages, manages, and develops its workforce to utilize its full potential and the workforce is aligned with the organization's overall mission, strategy, and action plans.
  
  
• Process Management – The organization determines its core competencies and work systems and how it designs, manages, and improves its key processes for implementing those work systems to deliver customer value and achieve organizational success.
  
  
• Results – The organization examines its performance and improvement in all key areas: product and service, customer-focused outcomes, financial outcomes, workforce-focused outcomes, process effectiveness outcomes, and leadership outcomes. The organization also examines its performance relative to competitors and other organizations providing similar products and services.
  
  
• Trusting Partnerships – The organization builds relationships with customers. An increasingly important aspect to achieving organizational success is operating in a cooperative, collaborative, and transparent way with honest, ongoing and thorough communication.

By using the above criteria, the North Carolina Department of Transportation hopes to make a positive impact with our environmental stewardship and streamlining activities and establish better working relationships, higher productivity, and greater customer satisfaction without compromising our transportation program or our natural and human environment. In the long term, NCDOT seeks to create a positive organizational cultural change that will greatly improve our internal and external environments.

NCDOT’s Office of Environmental Quality has structured its environmental stewardship and streamlining activities around these performance excellence criteria.