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During the American Society for Quality's recent annual Quality Congress, I had the opportunity to speak with many quality professionals who came to visit our booth. The problem I heard the most about was their relationships with management, or more accurately, the lack of relationships. Many of them bought my autobiography Quality and Me: Lessons From an Evolving Life to learn how I have dealt with long-standing conflict between managers and employees.
In short, the real problem lies with quality professionals, not with management. It isn't that managers don't care about quality; they really do. Managers just don't understand quality and don't know how to go about getting it to be an advantage instead of a problem. Their primary job is to create a reliable organization, and quality lies at the heart of that task. Unfortunately, quality professionals haven't done a good job communicating to management the importance of quality to the organization. Here are the reasons:
1. Quality professionals don't know the language of management. Managers talk about accounting, marketing, customers and such. All of these have code words with specific meanings and numbers that measure progress.
2. Professionals don't know the language of quality. Quality is not an adjective, it's a noun. It doesn't mean goodness--it means doing what you said you would do. Management turns away from those who talk about relative goodness. No action anywhere in business comes from a packaged set of procedures. Managers will accept ISO 9000 as a marketing necessity, but they don't think well of anyone who feels it makes a difference in the conformance of the output. Managers think in numbers; they only understand and drive quality when told the price of nonconformance (PONC). The cost of quality doesn't cut it; rather it is viewed as a tax. (For further explanation, PCA II has a new CD-ROM that teaches how to understand and use PONC). Managers are busy people, so they expect their functional leaders to be able to explain what they do in a couple of sentences.
3. Quality professionals have a low self-image. They need to take charge of making their organization reliable. They will get the credit for this and be appreciated. This is where money and status originate.
4. Quality professionals don't learn well from the nontechnical experience of others. I went from an inspector on an assembly line to department head in six years, then to corporate vice president of Fortune 500's #11 company in seven more years. I started my own company 14 years later, and took it public soon after. I was successful because I was useful and reliable. None of the quality control technical material I learned over the years helped a bit in this regard.
5. Quality professionals think quality is a technical and procedural entity. They concentrate on corrective action rather than prevention, don't build relationships and place undue value on certifications.
The solution to the problems of the quality professionals doesn't require a meltdown and reconfiguration of management, or a new set of procedures: It lies in their own hands.
About the Author
Philip B. Crosby, a popular speaker and founder of Philip Crosby Associates-now PCA II-is also the author of several books, including Quality and Me: Lessons from an Evolving Life (Jossey-Bass, 1999). Visit his Web site at www.philipcrosby.com |
