BIG Q AND SMALL q LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY:The roles of a Quality Leader

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Total Quality Management MGT510

Lesson # 32

BIG Q AND SMALL q LEADERSHIP FOR QUALITY

Big Q and Small q:

Dr. Juran contrasted the difference between managing to achieve Quality across the Board, in all

functions of the organization, and for all the products and services (Big Q) with managing for quality

on a limited basis (Little or Small q). Quality Control and inspection activities are little or Small q.

Quality Assurance may be Big Q or Small q depending upon how it functions within an organization.

Total Quality efforts known as efforts for Big Q. Quality is strategic and requires leadership in all

functions and across organization.

Leadership for Quality:

Leadership is fundamental to management and organizational behavior and is on just about everyone's

short list of prerequisites for organizational success. Thus it is not surprising that leadership plays a

crucial role in the total quality organization. Virtually every article and book written about quality

emphasizes leadership. "Teach and institute leadership" is one of W.E. Deming's 14 Points. Leadership

is the first category in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and is recognized as the "driver"

of successful quality systems.

Perspectives on Leadership

In practice, the notion of leadership can be as elusive as the notion of quality itself. Most definitions of

leadership reflect an assortment of behaviors, for example:

Vision that stimulates hope and mission that transforms hope into reality;

Radical servant hood that saturates the organization;

Stewardship that shepherds its resources;

Integration that drives its economy;

The courage to sacrifice personal or team goals for the greater community good;

Communication that coordinates its efforts;

Consensus that drives unity of purpose;

Empowerment that grants permission to make mistakes, encourages the honesty to admit them,

and gives the opportunity to learn from them; and

Conviction that provides the stamina to continually strive toward business excellence.

Although true leadership applies to everyone in an organization we generally think of executive

leadership, which focuses on the roles of senior managers in guiding an organization to fulfill its

mission and meet its goals, when we use the term.

Why is leadership so important to quality? Leaders establish plans and goals for the organization. If the

plans and goals d not include quality or, worse yet, are antithetical to quality, the quality effort will die.

Leaders help to shape the culture of the organization through key decisions and symbolic actions. If they

help to shape a culture that puts convenience or short-term benefits ahead of quality, it will die.

Leadership distributes resources. If resources are showered on programs that cut short-term costs while

quality is starved for resources, quality will die. This list could go on. Virtually everything that an

organization needs to succeed in meeting its customers' expectations goals, plans, culture, resources

can either be helped or hurt by leaders. With this in mind, let us examine in more detail the roles that

leaders play in a total quality company.

The criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award also dwell heavily on leadership. Here is

the philosophy of leadership within the Baldrige criteria:

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An organization's senior leaders should set directions and create a customer focus, clear

and visible values, and high expectations . . . The directions, values, and expectations

should balance the needs of all your stakeholders. Your leaders should ensure the

creation of strategies, systems, and methods for achieving excellence, stimulating

innovation, and building knowledge and capabilities. The values and strategies should

help guide all activities and decisions of your organization.

Senior leader should inspire and motivate your entire workforce and should encourage

all employees to contribute, to develop and learn, to be innovative, and t be creative.

Senior leaders should serve as role models through their ethical behavior and their

personal involvement in planning, communications, coaching, and development of

future leaders, review o organizational performance, and employee recognition. As role

models; they can reinforce values and expectations while building leadership,

commitment, and initiative throughout your organization.

The roles of a Quality Leader

Underlying the concept of quality leadership are some clear imperatives for managers who aspire to

quality leadership. First, they must establish a vision. Second, they must live the values. Third, they

must lead the improvement efforts. Let' examine each of these in turn.

Establish a Vision

A vision is a vivid concept of what an organization could be. It is a striking depiction of possibilities, of

potential. It is a dream, both in the sense of being desirable and in the sense of being a long ay from the

current reality, but it is not an "impossible dream." A vision should be clear and exciting to an

organization's employees. It should be linked to customers' needs and convey a general strategy for

achieving the mission.

To be quality leaders, managers must establish a vision for and in their organization. "Establishing" a

vision implies both the intellectual and emotional work of conceiving the vision and the interpersonal

and managerial work of communicating the vision to the organization and leading employees to

embrace it. Jane Carroll, president of The Forum Corporation, Europe/Asia, emphasizes the visionary

role of leadership for quality, which she calls focus. She believes that most managers do not understand

the need for a quality vision and their personal involvement in establishing it:

In our experience, very few CEOs have a real sense of what their role is in the quality

improvement process. It goes far beyond simply being a cheerleader and handing out an

occasional award. Top management has to provide the proper focus for the

organization. This is not something that can be delegated.

Putting together a vision is hard work, but quality leaders do not have to do it alone. They can draw

upon the talents and imagination of all the members of their organizations in developing their vision. In

fact, in many organizations, people are walking around with "mini-visions" of their own that sound like

"if only we could [do something they have been told can't be done], things would be so much better

around here." The raw material for a vision may be all around leaders in the organization. The first step

may be simply listening for it. Leaders who are open to the ideas of people throughout the organization

will be much better prepared to develop a vision that people will accept.

In the current competitive environment, if a given organization is not pursuing a customer-oriented

vision, competing organizations probably are and are planning to use their vision to win over the

competition's customers (or are already doing so). This is why a quality vision is such a crucial first step

in quality leadership. An organization with no vision about how to create long-term customer loyalty

has little chance of survival (unless, of course, it's a monopoly). The second part of establishing a vision

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is instilling it in all the members of the organization. This will be a lot easier if many people were

involved in the first part of the process, and the leader doesn't act like coming down the from the skies.

Live the Values

Pursuing the quality vision commits the organization to living by a set of values such as devotion to

customers, continuous improvement, and teamwork. A manager who hopes the organization will

embrace and live by these values must live them to the utmost.

Manager's actions can symbolize their commitment to quality-oriented values in many concrete ways.

For example, they can attend training programs on various aspects of quality, instead of just sending

others. They can practice continuous improvement in processes that they control, such as strategic

planning and capital budgeting. Perhaps most importantly, they can provide adequate funding for

quality efforts. So that TQ will not be the "poor cousin" to other business issues.

Lead Continuous Improvement

Beyond establishing vision for the organization and expressing quality values through their decisions

and actions, quality-oriented leaders must lead the continuous process improvement efforts that are the

meat and potatoes of total quality management. All of the vision and values in the world are worthless if

the organization is not continuously making strides to improve its performance in the eyes of customers.

Visions of world-class quality and competitiveness can only be achieved if an organization keeps

finding ways to do things a little better and a little faster. Leaders must be at the center of these efforts.

Managers are sometime reluctant to take an active role in the organization's improvement

efforts for fear of dominating or undercutting their newly empowered workers. Like

many aspects of management, this is a question of balance, but it is mistake for

managers to remain uninvolved in process improvement efforts.

There are a number of ways for managers to lead continuous improvement, and which ones make the

most sense will depend on the specific organization. One option already mentioned is for leaders t lead

by example, by working continuously to improve the processes that they control. For some of these

processes, organizational members are among the customers, which gives management the opportunity

to model for them the behaviors associated with obtaining and acting upon customer input. If

management were to streamline the capital budgeting procedure by speeding up the process and

eliminating non-value-added activities, it would provide a powerful example for people to emulate.

A second way that managers can lead process improvement is to help organization members prioritize

processes to work on. Here managers can take advantage of their knowledge of the "big picture" and

suggest avenues of improvement that are likely to have big payoffs in terms of quality improvement and

customer satisfaction.

Third way is to inspire people to do things they do not believe they can do. Motorola set aggressive

goals of reducing defects per unit of output in ever operation by 100-fold in four years and reducing

cycle time by 50 percent each year. One of Hewlett-Packard's goals is to reduce the interval between

product concept and investment payback by one-half in five years. The 3M Company seeks to generate

25 percent of sales from products les than two years old. To promote such "stretch goals," leaders

provide the resources and support necessary to meet them, especially training.

Of course, managers leading process improvement bear some responsibility for educating al their

associates as to how the various processes within the company fit together. If this is done effectively,

organization members will be able eventually to set their own priorities for process improvement.

Managers can also lead this effort by removing barriers to success in process improvemet.16 Barriers

may consist of a nettlesome standard operating procedure or a recalcitrant manager in a key position.

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Total Quality Management MGT510

Without leadership from management, such barriers may undermine efforts at process improvement. Of

course, in dealing with such barriers managers must continue to operate in a manner consistent with

quality values. For example managers who balk at changes must be treated with respect and their

reservations considered seriously, even if they are eventually overruled.

One final way for managers to lead process improvement is to keep track of improvement efforts, to

encourage them, and to provide recognition when key milestones are reached.

Management and Leadership

A recent treatment of leadership by John Kotter compares the concept of leadership to the concept of

management. According to this view, management is needed to create order amid complexity, and

leadership is needed t stimulate the organizational change necessary to keep up with a changing

environment. This view avoids the simplistic ideas that management is some-how trivial, generally

unnecessary, and should be replaced by leadership, and that the same person cannot practice both

management and leadership.

Kotter differentiates leadership from management by contrasting the activities central to each. While

management begins with planning and budgeting, leadership begins with setting a direction. Direction-

setting involves creating a vision of the future, as well as a set of approaches for a achieving the vision.

To promote goal achievement, management practices organizes and staffing, while leadership works on

aligning people-communicating the vision and developing commitment to it. Management achieves

plans through controlling and problem solving, whereas leadership achieves its vision through

motivating and inspiring.

Kotter's view of leadership similar to transformational theory dovetails with our depiction of quality

leadership. Both focus on developing and communicating a vision. Kotter's view of inspiring resembles

our discussion of giving people values to embrace and then making sure that the leaders is practicing

them.

The idea of aligning people is consistent with the idea of empowerment, because it gives people a goal,

and then leaves them to move in that direction. Our description of the role of leaders in continuous

improvement is more hands-on than Kotters description, perhaps suggesting that some management

behaviors will continue to be important to leaders in total quality organizations.

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