Quality From the Inside Out
Pat Townsend & Joan Gebhardt
ptownsend@qualitydigest.com
Quality efforts are too often
put in place from the outside in. It starts when someone
very senior decides to give some variant of “quality”--or
“continual improvement” or whatever other synonym
is used--a try, and proceeds to try to “make it happen.”
Plans are subsequently formulated at the senior levels
of the organization and the new attempt to become the “quality
alternative” in the organization’s particular
niche is launched. One approach is to train an appropriate
number of in-house experts who will, perhaps festooned with
distinctive articles of clothing, carry the message throughout
the company. Another is to establish an outsider as the
person who will determine if the company has correctly fulfilled
some set of specifications agreed on as the goal.
In any case, people eventually sally forth into the internal
workings of the organization and attempt to implement the
agreed-upon system. As the quality disciples are explaining
to everyone what statistics and measurements they (the experts)
need to do their work, the boss who initiated all of this
is preparing the marketing folks to proclaim “quality”
(or “excellence” or whatever word the marketeers
decide is hot) as their competitive edge.
This approach can be called quality from the outside in
because the people internal to the company--the ones who
truly do the work and who actually know the functional details
of the processes--first hear about it either in reading
the ads pushing their products or in hearing that they have
to provide certain numbers to an unfamiliar person. The
experts--either long-time employees who have only been recently
trained or newly-hired outsiders--take the numbers and,
after appropriate calculations, dictate new work processes.
The employees, resentful of the implication that they’ve
been doing it wrong all these months or years, balk. Absent
heavy pressure, the quality effort will begin to grind to
a quick halt. With heavy pressure, it can limp along, grudgingly
reaching minimal levels of improvement. At the first crack
in the resolution from the top, the effort will die.
The alternative? Quality from the inside out.
This approach will look to be slower at the outset--but
first glances can be deceiving. As regular readers of this
column know, one of its authors (Pat) is the director of
a quality effort at an insurance company in the Fort Worth,
Texas, area. The effort there, dubbed a Complete Quality
Process, is an example of quality from the inside out, and
the results at his company belie the assumption that such
an effort will be either a slow-starter or a short-term
effort on two counts:
• Every person on the payroll
was on a quality team, and the process was begun within
six months of the decision to “do quality”--and
the 81 quality teams implemented 556 quality ideas with
more than $5 million in annualized impact in the first year
of the effort. In addition, the second year of the CQP effort
has shown even better results than the first thus far, with
the number of implemented ideas exceeding 1,000 after 11
months.
• After two years, the effort
is gaining strength, and plans are being worked out for
steadily expanding the bag of tools used by the quality
teams and middle and senior level leaders.
What will make the expansion of the scope of the effort
very possible are these points:
• The quality teams have already
done extensive work improving their processes. They’ve
taken care of the majority of the “little” stuff
that never made sense to them. Although still admittedly
imperfect, at least the processes are better, and the people
who have to deal with the procedures--on a very personal,
change-my-work-day basis--took part in the improvement efforts.
They know that they aren’t finished.
• The senior executives have
been visibly involved from the beginning--not as dictators
of new procedures, but rather as people who have been taking
part in discussions about how to change what they do (senior
execs are on quality teams) and who have been supporting
and congratulating the quality teams for two years. Saying
“thank you”--in several ways and with some frequency--has
been an integral part of the effort and will continue to
be.
At this point, a series of classes on measurement will
be providing quality teams with tools they can appreciate.
Teaching mid- and senior-level leaders techniques of process
analysis will give them the skills to take full advantage
of workers who are already attuned to the idea of trying
to find better ways to get from where they are to where
the company needs them to be.
In short, the senior executive who originally makes the
decision to do quality is in a position to be authoritative
in directing his or her direct reports to get serious about
quality. But the facts of corporate life are that, with
each succeeding bureaucratic layer, there’s less need
to heed--and even less reason to enthusiastically embrace--the
boss’s latest hobby.
By first engaging the folks at the lower end of the corporate
ladder--primarily a matter of recognizing their expertise,
giving them the first chance at improving things, and working
hard at saying thank you--an organization can establish
the basis for a long-lived quality effort, one that moves
from the inside out.
Pat Townsend and Joan Gebhardt have written more than
200 articles and six books, including Commit to Quality
(John Wiley & Sons, 1986); Quality in Action: 93 Lessons
in Leadership, Participation, and Measurement (John Wiley
& Sons, 1992); Five-Star Leadership: The Art and Strategy
of Creating Leaders at Every Level (John Wiley & Sons,
1997); Recognition, Gratitude & Celebration (Crisp Publications,
1997); How Organizations Learn: Investigate, Identify, Institutionalize
(Crisp Publications, 1999); and Quality Is Everybody's Business
(CRC Press, 1999). Pat Townsend has recently re-entered
the corporate world and is now dealing with "leadership.com"
issues as a practitioner as well as an observer, writer
and speaker. He is now chief quality officer for UICI, a
diverse financial services corporation headquartered in
the Dallas area. Letters to the editor regarding this column
can be e-mailed to letters@qualitydigest.com.
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