Module II.
Process Quality Improvement
Lecture 4 How leadership influence process quality initiatives?
There is no universal definition of leadership and indeed many books have been devoted to the
topic of leadership. Researchers describe a leader as one who instills purposes, not one who
controls by brute force. A leader strengthens and inspires followers to accomplish shared goals.
Leader shapes, promotes, protects and exemplifies organization's values. Similarly, Daimler
Chrysler's CEO, Bob Eaton, defines a leader as "someone who can take a group of people to a
place they don't think they can go." As above definitions illustrate, leadership is difficult to
define in anything other than lofty words. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has a
more grounded definition of leadership in its core values. As stated in its core values and
concepts, visionary leadership is,
"An organization's senior leaders should set directions and create a customer focus, clear
and visible values, and high expectations. Directions, values, and expectations should
balance needs of all stakeholders. Leaders should ensure creation of strategies, systems, and
methods for achieving excellence, stimulating innovation, and building
knowledge and capabilities. Values and strategies should help guide all activities and
decisions of organization. Senior leaders should inspire and motivate entire workforce and
should encourage all employees to contribute, develop and learn, be innovative, and creative.
Senior leaders should serve as role models through their ethical behavior and their personal
involvement in planning, communication, coaching, development of future leaders, review of
organizational performance, and employee recognition. As role models, they can reinforce values
and expectations while building leadership, commitment, and initiative throughout your
organization."
Although leadership is difficult to define, successful quality leaders tend to have certain
characteristics as-
They give priority to external and internal customers and their needs.
Empower, rather than control, subordinates
Emphasize improvement rather than maintenance
Emphasize prevention.
Encourage collaboration rather than competition.
Train and coach, rather than direct and supervise.
Learn from problems.
Continually try to improve communication.
Demonstrate their commitment to quality.
Choose suppliers on the basis of quality, not price.
Establish organizational systems to support the quality effort.
Encourage and recognize team effort.
In order to improve process and system, leadership requires an intuitive understanding of human
nature-basic needs, wants, and abilities. To be effective, a leader understands that people
paradoxically need security and independence at the same time.
Leaders need to give their employees independence and yet provide a secure working
environment-one that encourages and rewards successes. A working environment must
be provided that fosters employee creativity and risk-taking by not penalizing mistakes. This is a
key part for process quality improvement.
A leader will focus on a few key values and objectives in the process. Focusing on a few values
or objectives gives the employees the ability to discern on a daily basis what is important and
what is not in the process. Employees, upon understanding the objectives, must be given
personal control over the process in order to make the task their own and, thereby, something to
which they can commit. A leader, by giving the employee a measure of control over an
important process, will tap into the employee's inner drive. Employees, led by the manager can
become excited participants in the organization.
Having a worthwhile cause such as total quality management is not always enough
to get employees to participate in process improvement. People follow a leader, not a
cause. If the leader is trusted and liked, then employees will participate in total quality
management causes.
Therefore, it is particularly important that a leader's character and competence, which is
developed by good habits and ethics, be above reproach. Effective leadership for improvement
begins on inside and moves out.
Ethics
Ethics is not a precept that is mutually exclusive from quality. Indeed, quality and ethics
have a common care premise, which is to do right things right.
Ethics is a body of principles or standards of human conduct that governs behavior
of individuals and organizations. It is about knowing what the right thing is. Ethics can mean
something different to different people, especially given
an organization's international workforce and varying cultural norms. Because individuals have
different concepts of what is right, leaders need to develop
standards or code of ethics. Quality is dependent on ethical behavior. Doing what is right in the
first place is a proven
way to reduce costs, improve process quality, and create higher customer satisfaction. Many
companies also hire ethics consultant to help them achieve their goal towards improvement.
Core Values, Concepts and Framework
Unity of purpose is the key to a leadership system. Core values and concepts provide that
unity of purpose. Core values and concepts enable a framework for leaders through-
out the organization to make right decisions. They foster TQM behavior and define
culture. Each organization needs to develop its own values. Given below are few core
values, concepts, and framework from Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
They may be used as a starting point for any organization for quality improvement initiatives.
Visionary leadership
An organization's senior leaders need to set directions and create a customer orientation,
clear and visible quality values, and high expectations. Values, directions, and expectations need
to address all stakeholders. The leaders need to ensure the creation of strategies, systems, and
methods for achieving process excellence. Strategies and values should help guide all activities
and decisions of the organization. The senior leaders must commit to the development of the
entire workforce and should encourage participation, learning, innovation, and creativity by all
employees. Through their personal roles in planning, communications, review or organization
performance, and employee recognition, the senior leaders serve as role models, reinforcing the
values and expectations, and building leadership and initiative throughout the organization.
Customer-Driven Excellence
Quality is judged by its customers. All product and service characteristics that contribute
value to the customer and lead to customer satisfaction is the focus of an organization's process
management system. Customer-driven excellence
has both current and future components: understanding today's customer desires and
marketplace offerings as well as future innovations. Value and satisfaction may be influenced by
many factors throughout the customer's overall purchase, ownership, and
service experiences. These factors include the organization's relationship with customers that
helps build trust, confidence, and loyalty. This concept of quality includes
not only the product and service characteristics that meet basic customer requirements, but it also
includes those features and characteristics that differentiate them
from competing offerings. Customer-driven quality is thus a strategic concept. It is directed
toward customer retention, market-share gain, and growth. It demands constant sensitivity to
changing the process and emerging customer and market requirements and the factors that drive
customer satisfaction and retention. It also demands awareness of developments in technology
and of competitors' offerings, and rapid and flexible responses to customer and market
requirements.
Agility
Success in global markets demands agility. Organizations face ever-shorter cycles for
introduction of new and improved products and services, as well as for faster
and more flexible response to customers. Major improvements in response time often
require simplification of work units and processes and ability for rapid changeover
from one process to another. Cross-trained and empowered employees are vital assets in
such a demanding environment.
Managing for Innovation
Innovation means making meaningful change to improve an organization's products,
services and processes to create value for organizations stakeholders. Innovation can lead an
organization to new dimensions of performance. Innovation is
no longer strictly the purview of research and development departments; innovation is important
for all aspects of business process. Organizations should be
led and managed so that innovation becomes part of organization culture.
Management by Fact
Organizations depend on measurement and analysis of process performance. Such measurements
should derive from business needs and strategy, and should provide critical data and information
about key processes, outputs, and results. Performance measurement should include customer,
product, and service performance; comparisons of operational, market, and competitive
performance; and supplier, employee, and cost and financial performance.
Systems Perspective
The Baldrige Criteria provide a systems perspective for managing an organization to
achieve performance excellence. The Core Values form building blocks and integrating
mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires
organization-specific synthesis and alignment. Synthesis means
looking at an organization as a whole and building upon key business requirements, including
strategic objectives and action plans. Alignment means using key linkages
among requirements given in Baldrige Categories, including key measures/
indicators. Alignment includes using measures/indicators to link key strategies with
key processes and align resources to improve overall performance to satisfy customers.
Thus, a systems perspective means managing whole organization, as well as its
components to achieve success.
More details on Baldrige Categories, leadership and quality leadership can be seen in the book
by Besterfield et al. (2004), Evans (2005).