Bill Troy, CEO of the American Society of Quality started a discussion asking if Quality Professionals were also leaders. And my first impression was, “Well… yes we are!”. If I think about the work I do every day with my clients. Most of them are small business owners. Do you know which is the most common issue they have? People.
I did a survey both in Argentina and in the US about company issues. The result? Most of the respondents had the lowest score on people performance.
And these surveys match exactly with what I hear every day. Employees that don’t perform, employees that don’t follow procedures, envy, lack of team work, lack of communication, lack of commitment, demotivation… you name it. The list is endless.
If I am not able to solve all these issues, I will not be able to improve the quality of their work.
Let’s take an example. In order to improve a service to a customer I follow the following steps:
- Analyze the current process. To do so I need to gather all the employees involved and listen to them.
- Respect their opinion so that they clearly state in the meeting all the pros and cons of the different suggestions.
- Handle their emotions and even mine to make a decision an define the “to be” process.
- Build trust, otherwise they wouldn’t implement the new process if they don’t trust it will work.
- Be responsible and make a commitment to follow up on the new process to make sure it is implemented as planned.
- Show a positive attitude when it takes time to make it right, so that everybody continues working on the improvement even though when they still don’t see the results, or even when it looks like it is more work now than before.
- Appreciate the hard work and thank all the people involved when the sun shines again, and the new process is fully in place reducing total cycle time, improving customer satisfaction rates or reducing costs.
- Be patient if the process needs to be reviewed again
Once I read a book on leadership called “The Servant: A simple story about the true essence of leadership” by James Hunter. Basically he said that leadership is the art of influencing people so that they work with enthusiasm to achieve objectives. Looks similar to what I do every day, right? Yes, James Hunter mentioned a list of abilities required to be a leader really similar to my list above.
So, my conclusion is: I am not sure if all the quality professionals are good leaders, but I am sure that we have to do our best to be a good one in order to do our work as a quality professional effectively. What do you think?
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