Agile leadership: the future of quality in small business

Reading Laurel Nelson-Rowe post on the future of quality I could learn about the 2015 Future of quality report, and got really interested on the first article “The future of leadership: From Efficiency to Adaptability”, which is a topic I learn about every day in my job as small business consultant.

In the past, Ford was really successful applying the taylorist recipe of a leadership to improve quality, totally oriented to tasks and efficiency. New theories from Mayo and Deming in the middle of the 20th century started to switch leader’s attention from tasks to people.

Today’s global, high speed, complex, and disruptive business environment demands more dynamic leaders to achieve quality, continuous improvement and keep up with the demands of the new generations. Companies need to make their organizations more adaptive and agile to play many roles with different mind-sets.
Still, is true that there are many companies, especially small and familiar business, which continuer looking forward to pursue efficiency the old way, and at the same time ask themselves, why their teams are nor committed or motivated at work.

Small Business owners in particular need to learn to be flexible to quickly adapt to changes and teach their employees to be agile as well. It’s common to fall in love with experience or previous success, but that make managers indispensable in decision making on challenging situations. This become a bottle neck which may delay issues resolution reduce and make it impossible to focus on quality management, as it consumes lots of the owner’s time that could be used on strategic thinking and business planning.
As the article mentions, “Quality leadership is about taking a long-horizon view”. Leaders need to shift their mindset from focusing on today’s revenues to helping their employees to focus on the revenue.
A new leadership model, agile leadership, help managers to develop a short set of skills that enable them to think of new objectives while attending daily challenges.

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people. They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did it ourselves.” – Lao Tzu


The skills are:

• Quick and sound Decision making: Entrepreneurs tend to be very intuitive, but successful intuition can be improved not only with more experience but also with more theoretical knowledge and help from external coaching
• Self-awareness: Maintain the self-control that people respect and respond to. Keep calm under any circumstances and be flexible to Change roles, mind-sets and behaviors, as needed, letting go the old ways.
• Working under pressure and uncertainty. Pilots and tests can help leaders “just try something” without feeling guilty if it doesn’t work. Entrepreneurs need to be able to pivot and star over easily, it’s all a matter of accepting that a mistake is not a fatal failure, it’s just a step closer to success. John Maxwell says that “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.”
• Continues learning: learn specific leadership roles that will help in the different situations you may encounter. Experience in the tasks you perform and the ones your workers perform, together with theory, will help to continue learning to confront any situations, from being negotiator, delegator, inquirer, coach, collaborator, facilitator to innovator or strategist. 
• Training: if the manager is the only one that is able to make decisions, nowadays it is not enough, his limited capacity will narrow the business future. Leaders need to learn to train their middle managers to be decisions makers just like them. They need to develop trust and drive out any fears. That is, expectations need to be set and mistakes need to be forgiven to allow employees to start getting dirty.

Business owners today need to adapt their leadership programs to the context and focus on a small amount of abilities that they can focus on improving and immediately be able to apply them in their day to day situations. Just like big company leaders, patience, willing to change and quality focus are key for business survival. 
As Laurel said, keep in mind to plan, do, study and act quality every day, everywhere.

Luciana.paulise@biztorming.com.ar
CEO Biztorming Training & Consulting