Total quality is an expression of the need for continuous improvement in four areas:
1. Personal and professional development
2. Interpersonal relations
3. Managerial effectiveness
4. Organizational productivity
• Personal and professional development. I’ve always liked the expression “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.” In reality you and me are the keys to total quality. W. Edwards Deming, the economic Isaiah of our time, has said that about 90 percent of the problems in organizations are general problems (bad systems)—only about 10 percent are specific problems with people. W. Edwards Deming’s principle, constancy of purpose, implies that we first have a purpose or mission—a statement of what we are about, a vision of what we can become.
• Interpersonal relations. Total quality on an interpersonal level means making constant deposits into the emotional bank accounts of others. It is continually building goodwill and negotiating in good faith, not in fear. If you create an expectation of continuous product or service improvement but fail to deliver on that expectation, you will see a buildup of fear and negative forecasting.
• Managerial effectiveness. Managerial quality is basically nurturing win-win performance and partnership agreements—making sure they are “in sync” with what is happening inside that person and what is happening inside the business. These win-win agreements are subject to renegotiation at any time—ideally on a synergistic basis, not a positional bargaining basis, and open to all the dynamics and vicissitudes of the market. So there is a sense of two-way openness.
• Organizational productivity. Proactive leadership springs from an awareness that we are not a product of our systems, that we are not a product of our environments, that those things powerfully influence us, but we can choose our responses to them. Proactivity is the essence of real leadership. Every great leader has a high level of proactive energy and vision—a sense that “I am not a product of my culture, my conditioning, and the conditions of my life; rather, I am a product of my value system, attitudes, and behavior—and those things I control.”
Total quality is a total philosophy, a total paradigm of continuous improvement in all four dimensions. And it is sequential; if you don’t have it personally, you won’t get it organizationally. You can’t expect organizations to improve when the people don’t improve. You might improve systems, but how do you get a commitment inside the culture to improve systems? People have to grow and mature to where they can communicate to solve the problems to improve those systems.
Total quality is a principle-centered approach that has come out of the best the world has produced. In our training we emphasize the human side more than the technical side because we believe that the origin and the essence of total quality is empathy with customers, empathy with their motives and buying habits.
• First, we are not yet hurting enough.
• Second, we don’t want to change our life-styles.
• Third, even the best U.S. companies tend to regard quality as a program, a department. It’s not integrated in their structure, systems, style, and so forth.
Total quality is rooted in timeless principles:
• Faith, hope, humility
• Works, industry, research, testing
• Constancy, consistency, predictability
• Continuous improvement and progression
• Feedback based on both measurement and discernment
• Virtue and truth in human relations
