What is Engagement of people?

Last week we talked about the nature of leadership, and about leadership's role in choosing a direction for organizations. But leadership is only half the story. Leadership gives the organization a will, so to speak, by making decisions; but it is the membership that gives the organization hands, to carry out those decisions and get things done. Without its membership, without its hands, the organization scarcely exists at all.

What people often forget is that the cooperation of the membership is ultimately voluntary.* It's easy to forget this fact in ordinary conversation—"I've got a family to support," "I've got a mortgage to pay,"** "Only a few more years to retirement and freedom"—but a fact it remains. The only thing that keeps the members of an organization working at their jobs is that they want to be there. Otherwise they'd walk away.

It is therefore very strongly in the interest of organizational leadership to convince organizational membership that they want to stay. And all the ways and means there are to convince people to stay can be summarized as "engagement of people."

So how do you engage your people?

I'm pretty sure the first step is, Pay them. 😀

But of course that's not all of it. We've all heard people say, "I wouldn't do that kind of work for any price." So what else is needed? It depends, because we all prefer different things. It also depends what options each of us has available. 

There are any number of familiar considerations that make one workplace more attractive than another, so that people want to stay there longer:

• It helps if the leadership treats you with respect, as a responsible adult.
• It helps if the leadership treats you fairly.
• It helps if the leadership communicates clearly what they want you to do, so you don't have to guess (and risk guessing wrong).
• It helps if you feel like everyone's on the same team, and like you are all accomplishing something that matters.
• It helps if you have the chance to learn and improve at your job over time. It is even better if your coworkers and leadership recognize that you have learned and improved, and reward you accordingly.

And so on. Type the search terms "what makes a company a good place to work" into your favorite web browser, and you'll get a long list of ways to engage your people.

How does this affect Quality? 

Love and caring are the deep sources of Quality; so people who love their work and focus on it will do better work than those who don't. For this reason, many of the points I just listed improve Quality because they rid the workplace of distractions. 

As just one example, if you feel that your workplace is managed unfairly, that's a huge distraction which will prevent you from focusing on the work itself. Therefore leadership must not only be fair, but they must be seen to be fair, so that workers don't spend all their time guarding themselves against a perceived risk of injustice. 

The other points work similarly.  

There are also measures leadership can take which affect Quality directly.

• As we discussed last week (under "the paradox of empowerment"), no one can be an expert in everything. The more that leadership encourages employee empowerment at all levels, the more likely that problems can be addressed promptly by people with the right expertise.
• Empowerment also entails what W. Edwards Deming called, "Driving out fear." In an organization managed by respect rather than fear, employees will speak up about potential improvements, and will take initiative to implement them. But when you crowdsource the continual improvement process, you can expect more and faster improvements.
• As leadership introduces measurement against objective standards, employees become more willing to measure their own performance against clear definitions of high achievement—and therefore to aspire to higher performance in the future.
• ISO 9000:2015 even suggests that the organization can conduct surveys to assess how well employees are satisfied with their workplace, with the intention of communicating results openly and taking corrective action where needed. Readers may remember a discussion last year where I expressed doubt that such a question would really measure what it claims to measure. But if leadership can find genuine ways to assess engagement—even informal ones—that information has to be useful.  

Every organization has to engage its people at some level, simply to survive as an organization. But the more thoroughly and effectively you can engage with your people, the more they will feel both free and inspired to do a good job. And that's Quality.

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* See, e.g., Étienne de La Boétie, who points out in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1577, that even kings and governments rely on voluntary cooperation from subjects and citizens. 

** The character Nick Naylor, in "Thank You For Smoking," calls this "the yuppie Nuremberg defense." 

         

What is Leadership?

Everywhere we look, we see organizations with leaders. In worldwide bodies and the local PTA, in politics and the workplace, from kings and presidents to Yertle the Turtle—leaders seem to be universal. From time to time, at reliable intervals, someone will suggest that society try to get along without leaders; but the effort never lasts long. 

Leadership is so familiar that it's no surprise to find it a Quality Management Principle. But why is it so familiar? What is leadership, and why does it seem so hard to get along without it? Answering that raises another question: if leadership is indeed inescapable, what can it do for us? How can we use the phe­nom­enon of leadership to advance our Quality goals?

So many questions. Let's start at the beginning.

What it is and why we need it

In any work, there are two components: first you need a picture in your mind of what to do (or you have to decide among competing alternatives), and then you have to do it. When I write this article I start by deciding what to say, and then my fingers type the words out on my keyboard. But if I don't start by making decisions about what to say, I won't get anywhere. My fingers can't type this post by themselves until I tell them what to type.*

We all know this. It's almost too obvious to have to spell it out. But the same thing applies when we work in groups. In order to work together, we have to agree what we are working on; we have to agree who does which part; and we have to agree to common decisions along the way. Do we steer left or right? Do we paint it red or green? Who will be out front pulling, and who will be in back pushing? And so on. For simple jobs and small groups we can often agree by discussing it among ourselves. But that approach cannot scale: when the group is large enough or the job is complex enough, we have to delegate someone to make these decisions for the rest of us. And that person is by definition the "leader."

Therefore leadership is an unavoidable part of working together in large (or mid-sized) groups on big (or complex) jobs. As long as we live in a complex society, where organizations of all sizes tackle a bewildering number of jobs, we will continue to see leaders everywhere.

The paradox of empowerment

Ironically, just as the complexity of our work requires leaders, it also undermines them. 

As we have seen, complex work requires leaders because somebody has to decide all the questions that come up in the course of getting the job done. 

But complex work undermines leaders because nobody can be an expert in everything. The CEO might have gotten his position because of his flair for marketing, say, or for finance. But that skill does not equip him to define an Internet security policy for the office, or a preventive maintenance schedule for the factory. Like it or not, he has to ask other experts to decide those questions, and mostly he has to believe what they tell him. As a result, large and even mid-sized organizations have no choice but to adopt "employee empowerment"—not as a management fad, but as a way of life. When the work is even a little complex, it becomes essential to distribute responsibilities and authorities throughout the organization in line with individual expertise, rather than concentrating all decisions at the top.**      

How can leaders support Quality?

So our organization has leaders—probably several of them, at different levels. What can they do to support Quality?

There are a lot of straightforward steps that leaders can take, stemming from their role as decision-makers and from their position—especially at the higher levels—overseeing multiple areas at once.

• They can ensure that workers have the tools that they need to do the job: equipment, training, procedures, and any other needed resources.
• They can ensure that the organization's departments are working together, and not at cross-purposes. 
• They can ensure that relevant communications get all the way through the organization undistorted, so that workers have the information they need.

All of these responsibilities flow pretty directly from the basic job description of "leaders."

The personality of the organization

But there's another role for leaders beyond all that, and it's harder to put into words. Maybe I can start by pointing out that every organization—every department, every group, every team—reflects the personality of its leader. It's not always a perfect reflection. Sometimes you might think it's more like a funhouse mirror. But the effect is real.

I was surprised to discover this in my first managerial role. My predecessor in that position had been good at some things and less good at others. And the department's overall reputation in the company aligned pretty well with his strengths and weaknesses. When he left the company for another opportunity, I took his place. And over time I began to realize that people treated the department differently. After a while, our collective strengths and weaknesses aligned more to my personality and less to his. I won't dive into the details, because it might sound like disrespecting my predecessor, when in fact I learned a lot from him. I will always be grateful for what he taught me. But our personalities were very different, and the department reflected them—first his, and later mine.

As an aside, there's nothing supernatural or exotic in this effect. The manager of a department hires and fires people, rewards and punishes them, promotes or fails to promote. It's only natural that behaviors which the manager thinks are important will come to predominate.

This "manager effect" on the personality of an organization puts enormous responsibility on the shoulders of leadership. 

• Do you want to instill a Quality culture? That's easy: just make sure all of your leaders care passionately about Quality. 
• Do you want to encourage an ethical business culture? Nothing could be simpler: just make sure your leadership are utterly incorruptible and intolerant of corruption. 
• Do you want a culture of innovation and risk-taking? Let workers see their leaders take risks—including risks that fail—and get away with it.
• Do you want all of the above, all at once? That may be harder. But again, you have to start with leadership.

Just remember that all eyes are on your leaders, all the time. So if you are a leader, you cannot allow yourself to slack off. Maybe you relax when you get home—that's none of my business, and I don't need to know. But while you are at work you have to be a living, breathing example of what you want from your people. Every minute, every day. The reason is that they are going to imitate you whether you like it or not—but they will imitate the real You, the one they actually see, not the cardboard cutout you wish they saw instead. So whatever behavior you want to get from them, that's the way you have to live.***

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* Compare Aristotle's remarks on work in Pol., I, 2, §2, 1252a-b.  

** It is a commonplace of political theory that centralized autocracies are less efficient, less resilient, and more fragile than decentralized free societies, because all decisions have to be approved by the autocrat. This means that important matters are delayed until he has time to attend to them. It also means that these decisions, when finally taken, are frequently wrong. In the same way it is no accident that ISO 9001:2015 requires the organization to implement employee empowerment at appropriate levels. Clause 5.1.1(j) requires top management to "[support] other relevant management roles to demonstrate their leadership as it applies to their areas of responsibility." (In other words, top management has to empower other roles to step up and take control of their areas.) And clause 5.3 requires top management to "ensure that the responsibilities and authorities for relevant roles are assigned, communicated and understood within the organization."   

*** This sounds like the advice often given to the parents of young children, for good reason. Obviously your adult employees are not children! But this specific dynamic—I mean the "manager effect," where a department takes on the personality of the manager—just happens to work the same way at home or on the job.       

What is Customer focus?

The first Quality Management Principle supporting any quality management system is Customer Focus. And in many ways, it is the most important. As we saw last week, the other basic principles establish a management system as suitable for a sustainable organization: that is, a social organism which uses rational self-reflection to adapt to its environment. But Customer Focus is what points that management system (and that organization) towards Quality. Quality means that your customers get what they want; and you can't get there without focus. For this reason, ISO 9000:2015 defines that:

The primary focus of quality management is to meet customer requirements and to strive to exceed customer expectations.* [2.3.1.1]

But why does it really matter? How do you do this? And who counts as your customer?

Why does customer focus matter? 

Of course at the most basic level, customer focus matters because if you treat your customers badly they will take their business elsewhere. And if they go to your competitors, you'll go out of business. 

But there is more than that. Customers are the whole purpose for an organization. Peter Drucker famously observed, "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." And logically, this makes sense. The only valid purpose for a nursery is to support gardeners. The only valid purpose for a hospital is to treat and cure sick people. The only valid purpose for a car dealership is to enable people to drive cars. And so on. Customer focus means paying attention to the one thing that gives all our work meaning.

How do you focus on customers?

There are as many ways to focus on customer needs as there are customers or needs. But a few simple ideas are basic.

First, you have to know what your customers really need (or want), and what you are able to provide. If those line up, that's great; if they don't, you might want to do something to correct the mismatch.

What is more, if you work as part of an organization (and not as a sole proprietor), you have to make sure that everyone in the organization is working on the same thing, or at least pulling in the same direction. This is trickier than it sounds, because sometimes organizations end up serving the demands of their own procedures rather than acting in a way that benefits their actual customers.

We discussed this risk in a blog post a couple of years ago, when I described the work of John Seddon. Seddon has made a career out of prodding executives to see their businesses from the outside, the way a customer does. His first step when working with a new client is to send top management out to the front office to watch a single order come in, and then to track that order through its whole life-cycle. Invariably, the order winds its way through a dozen departments; the whole path is so complicated that it takes way longer than it would have taken if one person had handled the job from start to finish. Also, with every additional step there's another chance for error. This kind of work cycle, which is all too common in the largest organizations, is a direct consequence of forgetting to focus on the customer's perspective.

Again, customer focus can take thousands of forms depending on the specific details of what work you do and who your customers are. But start by seeing things from their perspective.

For that matter, … who exactly are your customers, anyway? 

Who is your customer?

We can start with a definition, but we won't end there. ISO 9000:2015 defines a customer as a:

person or organization that could or does receive a product or a service that is intended for or required by this person or organization. [3.2.4]

So far, so good. But who else do you have to consider?

Direct and indirect customers

Some customers are indirect; that is, they don't walk into your store or pay you directly, but they buy your goods from one of your customers, or from a distributor. I have a friend who makes custom light fixtures by hand, and many of his sales go through a distributor for practical reasons—so he can focus on creating the works instead of marketing them.

Then there are people who look like customers but don't end up buying from you. Another friend works in retail, in a niche that requires a lot of customer consultation. Her store is recognized as the best local source for expertise in their line of work. Of course most people who get their information there also shop there; but once in a while people will come in and learn everything they can from the sales staff … only to spend their money somewhere a few dollars cheaper. Are these people "customers"? In a sense perhaps they are. More to the point, the store has to understand that these people exist, and to advise the sales staff how best to work with them.

Other interested parties

The most recent edition of the ISO quality management system standards generalized the concept of customer by introducing that of interested party. ISO 9000:2015 defines an interested party as a:

stakeholder; [a] person or organization that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision or activity [3.2.3] 

As we saw a few years ago while discussing the case of universities (see this post and this one), the concept of "interested party" is in many ways simpler than the concept of "customer." And it shouldn't be hard for most organizations to list the interested parties that care about the outcome of their operations. For example, your state may require you to apply for a business license in order to operate. Strictly speaking the state government isn't a customer, but everyone understands the need to obtain all the appropriate licenses before you open your doors. So naturally the state's "needs and expectations" have to be taken into account.  

Unusual interested parties

Sometimes you might have "interested parties" that aren't so obvious. 

Let's consider an unpleasant example—and one that I hope will never happen to you in real life! Suppose a representative of the Corleone Family comes into your shop one day, looks around, and says, "This is a nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it." Then he offers to "sell you insurance" to protect your shop. Does this thug count as an "interested party"?

According to ISO, he might. It depends on how credible a threat he poses. If you are confident that the police can protect you, naturally you'll prefer to ignore him. But ISO 9000:2015 clarifies the concept of interested party by explaining:

The relevant interested parties are those that provide significant risk to organizational sustainability if their needs and expectations are not met. [2.2.4, para. 2]

So if the Corleone Family truly poses a "significant risk," then it is fair to classify them as "relevant interested parties." And ISO 9000:2015's advice on customer focus suggests that one way to address such focus is to:

determine and take action on relevant interested parties’ needs and appropriate expectations that can affect customer satisfaction. [2.3.1.4]

Only you—or your organization—can determine whether "protection insurance" counts as an "appropriate expectation" from local criminals; but if you choose to pay it, ISO 9000 will back you up.

All our work is for the sake of something, which means that it is all—implicitly, at least—in the service of somebody. As long as we can remember that, we're well on our way towards sustainable Quality. 

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* There is room to discuss whether it is always right to exceed customer expectations. (See this post, for example.) But the standard says only "strive," so we can afford not to emphasize this point when it does not apply.  

    

Seven principles

Euclid, By Jusepe de Ribera - J. Paul
Getty Museum, Public Domain.

In day to day work, we often take for granted our basic understanding of Quality as a discipline. This is as it should be. Normally we're busy, we've got problems to solve, and we know that the Quality tools will help us solve them. There's no need to go all the way back to Euclid every time we have to measure a right angle.

But suppose we wanted to go back? What foundations does the Quality discipline actually stand on? Are there any, or is it just something we cooked up among ourselves because it sounded good?

Of course the answer depends on what part of the Quality discipline you ask about. The field's statistical tools are all based (obviously!) on statistics, which is a well-understood branch of mathematics. Problem-solving methods like PDCA are basically an application of the scientific method to industrial or business problems.

What about management systems? Are those based on anything?

Yes, actually they are.

The standard ISO 9000:2015 enumerates seven basic Quality Management Principles, on which rests the whole structure of the ISO quality management system standards, as well as any particular quality management system you or I might implement for our own companies. Because these principles are so fundamental, I thought it could be useful if I take a few weeks to analyze them one at a time, in order to unpack what each principle means and why it is there. That's my plan for the next seven weeks, unless it gets interrupted by something urgent.

But there's a question I'd like to address right at the beginning: Why these principles in particular? Is there really something that makes them more fundamental than any others?

The seven quality management principles are these:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Engagement of people
• Process approach
• Improvement
• Evidence-based decision making
• Relationship management    

Clearly they are all important. Clearly they are all good things to do. But what makes them any more fundamental than any other principles you might think of?

The point is that quality management systems are designed for use by organizations. 

• An organization is a social organism. 
• In order to continue to exist (to survive, or especially to prosper), an organization must use rational self-reflection in order to adapt to its environment.
• And in order to pursue Quality, an organization must (by definition) focus on the needs and wants of its customers and interested parties.

All of this follows more or less from the definition of quality management systems, and from basic observations about the nature of organizations. But look at the consequence.

• Customer focus means that the organization has to focus on the needs and wants of its customers and interested parties.
• Leadership and Engagement of people are fundamental to the definition of an organization as a social organism. Without Leadership, there is no unity or common purpose, and therefore no organism. Without Engagement of people there is no organism in another sense, because the people will just wander away.
• The Process approach and a commitment to Improvement give the organization the tools for rational self-reflection.
• Evidence-based decision making and Relationship management both mean that the organization adapts to its environment. Evidence-based decision making is how the organization adapts to the facts in its environment. And Relationship management is how the organization adapts to the other entities (persons, interested parties, or other organizations) in its environment. 

That's what makes these principles so fundamental.

In the coming weeks, we'll unpack them in detail.