How leadership influence process quality initiatives?

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 organization’s 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).