Tqm Business At Its Best Essay
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"You manage things, and you lead people. "
In a way, Grace Hopper' words are a formula for success in Total Quality Management, for she has offered equal but different approaches to things and people. Things can be manipulated, quantified, measured, and calculated, people cannot. By distinguishing between managing and leading, Hopper has given us to understand clearly that you cannot lead things or manage people - she's right.
Hopper's insight is universal and we are inclined to agree with it almost instinctively without having a notion of what it means in the day-to-day world. We feel like Calvin Coolidge's wife asking what the preacher had said about sin. "He said," Coolidge told her tersely, "he was against it. " Now that we know that, what do we do?
In hopes of clearing away some of the fog, I offer a formulation that, I believe, says the same thing as Hopper's version but is a little more quantified. It may not sound as impressive, but it is practical enough that we can do something with it.
It goes like this:
C + L + t1 + t2 = TQM
...that is,
Customer focus + leadership + teams + tools = Total Quality Management
The notion of "customer" is as foreign to as many bureaucrats as the idea of a bicycle is to a fish. We think of a customer as someone who buys something. In Total Quality Management, the word "customer" has taken on a new meaning: the beneficiary of our work. Beneficiaries may be people or organizations; they may be citizens or they may be the people at the next desk or in the next office. Beneficiaries outside our organizations are called "external customers;" those within, "internal customers."
Their designation as internal or external matters little. The point is that all we do is for their sake; without them, our work has no purpose. Therefore, if we are serious about quality, customers, regardless of whether they are internal or external, have every right to have their requirements, needs, and expectations met the first time and every time. So all definitions of quality -- in the sense that Total Quality Management people use the word --state or imply the same orientation: giving the customers what they want. Stew Leonard, the famous dairy entrepreneur in Norwalk, Connecticut frames the issue in earthy terms we all can understand (Crosby 40):
Rule 1: The customer is always right!
Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, reread rule 1.
These definitions of quality imply two properties: (1) freedom from defect (the negative aspect), and (2) pleasing the customer (the positive aspect) (Rao 20). In creating a product, a service, or a piece of knowledge, the two aspects must receive equal attention. In the federal government, the negative has a tendency to be accentuated -- getting rid of the defects (often under the name of "productivity," "zero defects," or "quality control") without much attention to the positive -- finding ways to please the customer. As a consequence, there is a tendency to become narrowly focused on issues like specifications and tolerances and overlook obvious factors like simple courtesy; arranging the work process for the comfort of the customer rather than ourselves; and getting the product, service, or knowledge to the customers when promised it -- or better yet, when they want it.
When government becomes dysfunctional, bureaucrats begin to look down on the customer as an ignorant nuisance. If customers are in a rival agency, they may be ignored, have to wait, or be told what they need. If they are in the general public, they are patronized. If they are in a different branch of government, things are made complicated, generalized, and delayed, hoping they will just go away. It is forgotten that in the public sector, unlike the private sector, losing customers is a luxury that is not dealt with; one of the worst things we can do is turn them into enemies.
We need, in short, to alter the way we think about customers. An unspoken underlying assumption of Total Quality Management is a reverence for people. That means starting out with the assumption that others (customers, suppliers, and subordinates included) are worthy people, both honest and competent - and treating them that way. Most people respond to trust with trust, once they get past the suspicious wariness that our normal way of managing has bred in them. Most people react to trust by behaving in honest and competent ways. A few -- about three percent--will not (Rao 16). We would do well to shape our behavior for the 97 percent.
What I am referring to here is transforming the organizational culture so that in all we do, the customer is foremost in our minds. That means that our continuous improvement efforts are aimed at quality as defined by our customers, not saving money or becoming more efficient. If we stress quality, cost and efficiency take care of themselves. In a quality culture, quality (meeting the customers needs, expectations, and requirements the first time and every time) becomes a way of life, an obsession.
So how do we create and institutionalize an obsession for pleasing customers?
First, by treating our own subordinates as people worthy of reverence -- that is, as internal customers. We must assume that they are honest and competent people whose requirements are valid. The way the people in an organization feel is the way their external customers are going to feel.
Second, by asking the customers what they want. If our customers are honest and competent people, they are perfectly capable of expressing their valid needs, although we may have to negotiate with them to translate those needs into measurable terms we can work to...
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