An overlooked Quality skill

Let me continue my line of thought from last week by asking, What skills do you need in your Quality department? Of course there are a whole list of Quality methods that you have to command to be at all effective: auditing, problem-solving, and documentation are high on that list, for example. Depending on the kind of work you do, you may need experts in inspection, or metrology, or statistical process control. And certainly I have argued before in this blog that you need to understand how your system as a whole holds together.

But there's another skill that is often overlooked. Let me tell you another story.

Years ago, I was responsible for the Quality system in a couple different locations, and had to report back to the Home Office. Now the company sat in the high-tech space, and most of the Quality personnel at the Home Office had a scientific or technical or engineering education. It was a point of pride for our whole department to be able to meet the company's engineers on their own ground when tracking down an elusive product defect.

But in one office that I was responsible for, the local Quality representative was a woman I'll call Lee Ann [not her real name] whose background was non-technical. She had a perfectly good grasp of 5-Why methodology, and was a reliable and systematic auditor. But she wasn't an engineer manquée, and never pretended to be. This caused some grumbling back in the Head Office. I even heard people mutter questions like When was I going to get rid of her and replace her with somebody more technical?

In fact there was no way I would have ever traded Lee Ann for someone more technical. I didn't need someone technical in that office. Yes, there was a small engineering presence there; but they were all solid, competent engineers. When product problems surfaced (rarely) they had all the expertise they needed to figure out what was wrong. But most of the personnel in that office were in Service or—especially—Sales. In many companies, Sales acts like The Department That ISO Forgot: yes, ISO 9001 has always had a requirement for Contract Review, but other than that the attitude (all too often) is close to, "Procedures? We don't need no stinking procedures."

So what I needed in that office was someone who could connect with the people in Sales and Service, to make them understand why the Quality system applied to them and to make them feel invested in it. And Lee Ann was a master of relationship-building! One by one she sat down with these people and talked with them informally. She found out what they did, and related their work in a simple way to the Quality requirements that applied to them.  Without making a fuss, she trained them on the system and its rules, in such a way that they were invariably grateful. She made it look easy enough that I'm still to this day not entirely sure how she did it. But she was a marvel, and her special talent was just what that office needed.

My general point is just that we in Quality can't achieve anything without the willing cooperation of all the other functions in the organization. For that reason, relationship-building has to be an essential part of the Quality toolkit.