When I was a General Manager in a company that decided to embark on a Performance Excellence program, I remember asking myself “what will I have to change in my own approach to leadership as my company negotiates this journey toward improved performance?”
Borrowing from Joseph M. Juran, the esteemed Quality Planning, Improvement, and Control guru and a contemporary of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, there are eight roles of leaders that simply cannot be delegated.
Leaders must:
- Serve on the governance vehicle that is established to guide the performance excellence (PE) journey. These vehicles used to be called the Quality Council, but now have names like the PE Governance Committee or the PE Implementation Team or the Strategy Execution Committee. Whatever it is called, it’s a great way to ensure active participation by the leadership in the direction, status, and decisions surrounding the PE culture change.
- Establish the high level organizational strategic goals. Many times this is done by driving and participating in a strategic planning process and then communicating, deploying, and translating the results of that process to the entire organization.
- Provide the necessary training to expedite the changed behaviors. The training and coaching needed for the new performance excellence approaches may include strategic planning methodologies, goal deployment, root cause methodologies, project management, structured performance reviews,and the like.
- Stimulate focused performance improvement. Obviously, if the under-performing measures in an organization are not specifically targeted and the root causes eliminated, then the only changes seen will be temporary common cause variation.
- Regularly review progress. This role is key to the culture change as employees must be held accountable for improving their portion of the organization. Moreover, this role also applies to holistically reviewing the growth and maturity of the organization using such tools as organizational assessments.
- Give recognition. Reinforcement of improved behaviors, processes, and results is a proven methodology to ensure that you continue to see more of the new outputs and outcomes.
- Revise the reward system. Ensuring that the reward system is changed to sync up with the new behavioral expectations is both logical and critical.
- Provide the needed resources. Finally, all of the previous
seven roles imply that resources must be allocated differently than in
the past. Employees will be asked to perform additional and different
tasks and training and coaching must occur that require leadership
support.
Many organizations seem to believe that the above tasks can be owned and executed totally by a quality manager, a strategic planning director, a training manager, or some combination of those and other positions. The truth is that the leaders must own these eight tasks, though of course they can -- and should -- work hand in hand with others to achieve them.
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