8 Quality Lessons I learnt from my mother

Have you ever thought your mother or any other relative could teach about quality in your small business? If you start to think about the people you know, there may be a lot, which will teach you quality lessons in day to day things, like my mother.

1. Planning: she always said that we need to set up objectives and have a plan for our day
2. Leadership:she led by example, doing what she said and saying what she did, the same as the ISO requirement. Her leadership way was cooperative, as she didn’t impose ideas but propose them in a persuasive way for us to decide. She never used fear to make us accomplish anything, as Deming would say “drive our fear, set clear expectations”.
3. Training: my mother always encouraged me and my brothers to study, and provided us with the resources, not only money but also her time to help us advance in our careers
4. Operations:I didn’t realize at that time, but doing my homework and studying a little every single day, was one of the premises of lean manufacturing, continuous flow in small batches.
5. Customers: she was and is still is today, the best “voice of the customer”. She always complains when something is wrong, suggests managers new ways of doing things to provide a better service or ways to avoid steps that don’t add value. On the other side of the counter, if she would say a promise, she would keep it, she was never late to any appointments
6. Suppliers: my mother respected all her suppliers, the newspaper guy, the man in charge of cleaning the pool, all the delivery guys… she always tried to pay them on time, talk to them when possible and kept the same supplier over time, in a long term relationship.
7. Results: she taught me to save money, organize my expenditures and reduce costs on non-value added tasks
8. People: when I told her I was going to write this post, she felt impressed, and asked me if had included one last lesson, which is that you always have to let people be who they are, and try to get the best out of them. As a social worker she established playing chess as a way to motivate people, even the worst students, who surprisingly, usually turned out to be the best players.

In the end, quality is applicable everywhere, as Bill Troy said in his post, people outside the quality field can teach us key lessons about quality. In late October I was on a Deming Seminar, and one of the speakers, Allan Kelly, said that “Deming make my day, every day”.
Who make your day every day with quality lessons?