Welcome back to my 14 day series on Deming's 14 points. Today we're going through point seven; instituting leadership. If you've read the previous installments you will have noticed this list isn't "in order". Why? Well, the reference and the inspiration for this exercise is a book published by ASQ Quality Press in 2002 titled "Fundamental Concepts of Quality Improvement". Edited by Melissa G. Hartman. I was reading through it some weeks ago and I liked how the 14 points were arranged and talked through. It seemed a good exercise to talk about each in the same order and relate them to my services. So sit back and read all about point seven.
Instituting Leadership
In Deming's view, the purpose of leadership is to push employees towards higher quality output rather than higher quantity output. By his reasoning higher quality requires the infrastructure of production to be more efficient anyway. Thusly, improvements in quality will net productivity increases. Additionally, employees are high-value assets for organizations to leverage.
In order to meet the scope of Deming's point, the responsibilities of leadership are twofold. Enable your people to output quality work. Monitor their output to affect improvement when necessary.
Facilitating output to a high standard will require a few components. Training is one. Solid job descriptions and supporting documentation for your work is another. Culture is your job too. Reinforce what you want people to do and be seen doing so. I cannot overstate your commitment to culture.
Monitoring output. There are quite a few ways to watch your system output. I won't try to convince you on any one method. Make sure your monitoring provides you information to take action. Data metrics without information you can immediately turn into action when needed is not useful. Don't mistake this for me proposing you don't have long term metrics. Do some work to figure out the right ways to monitor your systems. It is time well spent.
Leadership & Start. Somewhere.
Leadership is a primary concern of my program. Leadership involvement is a requirement for the system to work. The Start. Somewhere. exercise at project start is all about leadership improving their understanding of "why" and then diving into turning why into improvement. The where and how component of the system exists to identify the correct tool to apply and where in a system to do so.
A function of leadership is mentoring. Start. Somewhere. Mentoring is included with every project. This is a start to finish mentoring program you can launch right now.
Culture is driven through leaders. The culture framework is a tool to guide you through the tools you can use, compare them to what you are already doing, and help you build a path to better culture.
Start. Somewhere. is deeply rooted in leadership's critical role to quality output. What your organization does has little bearing on using good leadership principles to improve output and employee performance.
If you would like to learn more about my programs, please reach out.
