Commitment versus Leadership

I was so excited to see the word leadership in the ISO 9001:2015 quality management system standard, as there is a major difference between Top Management commitment and leadership. Over my 20 years as a quality professional, I have seldomly witnessed true Top Management leadership when it comes to an organization’s quality management system. On the other hand, I have often observed Top Management demonstrate leadership in other functions within the organization, such as sales, finance and accounting, but when it comes to quality, Top Management may have difficulty due to the perceived abstract nature of quality. Quality is not a verb. Quality Control is a verb, but quality is a culture where every person and department within the organization must take pride in every aspect of their jobs and even the jobs of their coworkers. PRIDE stands for: Personal Responsibility in Delivering Excellence. Establishing a culture of PRIDE can only be done by Top Management, as all other employees in the organization take their clues from Top Management. Organizations seeking to establish quality leadership and move beyond commitment within their organizations should consider the following three keys below.

Three Keys to Drive Quality Leadership

1. Model What You Want Multiplied
2. Inspire a Quality Culture
3. Make Quality Fun

Model What You Want Multiplied

Top Management cannot simply talk about quality, but must demonstrate quality leadership through their daily decisions and actions. Employees pay more attention to Top Management’s actions than their words. For example, if Top Management states that quality is a high priority, but the organization does not have necessary quality staff, resources or people given appropriate time to achieve quality, their actions are not consistent with their words. This is why it’s important for Top Management to model quality leadership on a consistent basis. Employees must not only hear Top Management talk about quality, but must see them demonstrate quality leadership in their actions. When there is an immediate need to source a supplier or the customer call with a rush job, this is not the time to bypass company processes and procedure that are in place. This is the time to model quality leadership, so that when employees are faced with their own temptations to skip processes and procedures in their daily jobs, the example has already been modeled for them to multiply. We can sum this up by Doing What You Say You Will Do (DWYSYWD). When employees see Top Management lead, they will also be inspired.

Inspire a Quality Culture

Organizations must discontinue thinking about quality as a department and quality control, but must see quality as part of the cultural fiber of the organization. Moving to quality leadership, means putting less focus on the products and more focus on the people that produce the products. Organizations must target the behaviors and perceptions of the people. Many organizations perceive quality as the responsibility of the Quality Department, like they see sale to be the responsibility of the Sales Department and financial matters as the responsibility of the Finance Department, but to move beyond quality commitment to quality leadership a quality culture must be established. Quality is not transactional or an activity. Quality is achieved when employees execute transactions or activities in compliance with established processes and procedures established by the quality system. Machining a part is an activity, but machining a part per specification, with personal pride is quality. Organizations must put more emphasis on inspiring a quality culture within the people that are executing the processes, so that quality leadership can be achieved. The organization must have quality leaders at all levels of the organization and not just at the top, as quality often breaks down at the lower level. When Top Management inspires a quality culture, line employees feel empowered and they start demonstrating quality leadership at their respective levels. A quality culture is established by engaging employees regarding the quality system and what it means to the organization and to them personally. To drive quality leadership people must be engaged more. This can be achieved by asking them some basic questions:

What do you like about our quality system?
What don’t you like about our quality system?
What works well?
What doesn’t work well?

You may be surprised of the amount of inspiration and quality leadership that can be sparked by simple engagement. When employees are engaged and become inspired, they start to understand that they are the quality system and that Quality is not a department. Once people are engaged, let’s have some fun!

Make Quality Fun

One reason organizations suffer from the lack of quality leadership, is that many people see quality as being boring and I agree, sometimes it can be a very boring subject, but there is nothing more exciting than a healthy quality culture. Let’s face it, people don’t want to lead something they don’t see as rewarding or enriching. Making quality exciting and fun, involves making the actual connection of quality results to the actions of the employees. When nonconformities decrease, it’s the quality demonstrated by employees that drove the improvement. When on-time delivery increases, employees made the improvement; therefore, they should be recognized for their efforts. One of the most effective quality systems I ever managed was based upon driving healthy competition, where everyone worked towards meeting established quality objectives and employees were recognized individually and as a team, which sparked employees to lead the quality effort individually and hold each other accountable for achieving quality objectives.

Conclusion

In conclusion, quality commitment focused more on product quality, but to move to leadership, organizations must put more emphasis on the people that make the products. Once the quality culture is established by Top Management setting the example, the employees of the organization will be inspired to also become quality leaders in their areas of responsibility. Oh yeah, don’t forget to make quality fun!

Author Biography

Oscar Combs is the Founder and Senior Consultant of The ISO 9001 Group, a management consulting firm based in Houston, Texas. Oscar has over 20 years of experience working for several of the largest corporations in North America. Oscar has worked throughout North America, South America, The Middle East and Africa helping companies manage risk and improve their business operations. Oscar holds an MBA from the University of Houston and maintains various industry memberships. He also sits on various industry boards and committees.