As quality professionals, we find ourselves in a never-ending search for breakdowns in systems, targeting opportunities for improvement with a relentless eye on the ever-out-of-reach but always-in-sight goal of total quality. Today, quality has multiple roles from assuring product quality, identifying performance gaps and causes, establishing and maintaining standards, and developing systems for continuous improvement throughout supplier/customer networks, to name just a few. Ultimately, quality has become a key participant in an exciting array of activities.

Despite having broad and deep roles, there remains a critical business arena where quality professionals are seldom purposefully engaged. Yet, this arena might be the most important opportunity for quality improvements and for assuring long term company performance. We are referring to the need for companies to give quality free reign to examine leadership. The fact that quality has ignored this domain is not the fault of quality professionals—the norm is to charge quality with improving operational issues, not improve management and leadership capabilities. Indeed, few leaders extend the charge to quality to “look upward.” So, day after day and year after year quality continuously labors away fine tuning operational aspects of the business, without focusing on some of the most pressing issues at hand.

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