Starting with the board and the CEO, the pursuit of quality or excellence is the job of everyone in the organization. Everyone, regardless of seniority or functional role, needs to do their jobs right the first time, meet customer requirements, and figure out ways to continuously improve their performance. It is important to remember that we all have customers—it’s just that some of them may be internal customers.

As Philip Crosby said, “Quality is too important to be left to the quality department.” Obviously, to deliver significant results, quality needs to be a mass movement involving everyone in the company.

Have a few full-time quality catalysts

Employing a few quality-crazy people who are obsessed with customers and passionate about your company’s quality program and its success can certainly be a huge catalyst.

In most companies that I have worked with, we created small quality departments. (In an earlier article, I wrote about the need to keep the quality department small.) However, we ensured that for the people in that department, quality was a full-time job.

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