The quest for quality is a worthwhile pursuit as well as noble calling. What it isn’t is a career with a sexy cachet. How many young people in college, much less high school, are interested in pursuing opportunities as quality managers, quality inspectors, or auditors of quality management system standards? How many even know what those jobs entail? Having the word “quality” in your title is increasingly a dead end to career advancement. That’s a sad irony because the actual work of continuous improvement and performance excellence has never been more important.
Quality, it’s pretty clear, has a branding problem. Maybe it always has. From the dawn of the modern industrial state a couple of centuries ago, organizations have sought to structure their output for maximum efficiency and profitability. Enhancing quality is vital work, but it’s hardly fast and rarely easy. That’s especially true now, in a business world of instantaneous communication and lightning-fast times-to-market.
Quality is prone to silo-ism which, again, is ironic. Doing the job well means breaking down silos and examining the organization as a holistic system with various inputs that, together, deliver expected outputs to customers. Whether those inputs come from R&D, sales, marketing, finance, customer service, etc., makes little difference. Quality should cut across all departments and processes. Yet the quality function itself is often relegated to its own silo, or, if you prefer, ghetto. “That’s a job for those quality people” is something that you might hear top managers say about a specific performance excellence initiative. They fail to understand that in truly exceptional, world-class organizations, everyone is “quality people,” even if no one has “quality” anywhere near their LinkedIn profile or sig block.
And there, right there, is the rub. How do we reclaim the power and prestige of a responsibility demanding Superman when the title sounds like something that Clark Kent would be ashamed of?
I believe it starts with a focus on function as opposed to form. Who cares what title the job carries if the person holding that role improves the efficiency and effectiveness of outputs?
Part of the problem here is that the quality role is often described too broadly and defined too narrowly. Let me explain what I mean.
To external stakeholders, one may describe or be described as the organization’s quality manager; it’s a role that could (and likely does) involve statistical process control, testing, industrial measurement, hardware and/or software acquisition, documentation, team training, and countless other tasks. Yet those specific functions are the ones that matter most when it comes to creating positive outcomes for customers. The broad “quality manager” job description alone doesn’t really represent reality.
On the other hand, internally, one may offer and/or accept the definition of primarily being responsible for, say, the organization’s ISO 9001 compliance. Although that may be true, obtaining and maintaining registration to a standard (or even a series of standards) isn’t the primary goal. You may “own” the demonstration of compliance, but ultimately you are responsible for delivering positive outcomes for customers. The narrow “ISO 9001 compliance” task definition alone doesn’t represent reality.
Getting hung up on descriptions and definitions isn’t helpful in fulfilling the critically important strategic imperative of improving the organization. “Quality” is a catch-all phrase that has worked for some time, but to continue having a seat at the table going forward, effective professionals need to understand the inherent organizational and procedural effects of risk, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), and financial analysis, not to mention having at least a passing familiarity with far-flung disciplines like psychology and chaos theory.
Redeeming quality means taking a fresh look at what organizations need and customers most desire. It means understanding the inputs and outputs not only of individual processes, but of the mission and vision of the organization as a whole. It means taking a step back and asking, “Why are we doing what we do? Who benefits, and why?” And then acting with energy and passion to drive positive change that’s aligned with those values, regardless of titles or taxonomy.
Quality by any other name would tell the feat.
About the author
Mike Richman is the principal of Richman Business Media Consulting, a marketing and public relations company working with clients in the worlds of manufacturing, consumer products, politics, and education. Richman also hosts the web television program NorCal News Now, which focuses on social, economic, and political issues in California. He is a contributor to (and former publisher of) Quality Digest.