Quality is not a department. It is a leadership decision. Five insights from quality management: on authority, methodological competence, transparency, shared standards and the interplay of challenge and support.
I have worked in engineering for over 35 years. I started out as a laboratory engineer and development engineer, and moved into quality management leadership via manufacturing process development and a variety of quality engineer roles. I have led teams of five to twenty employees, led quality organisations across several sites in a functional capacity and built quality organisations internationally.
Along the way I learned a lot about methods, but even more about leadership. Five insights have been confirmed again and again.
Quality is not a department. It is a leadership decision.
At a glance
A head of quality is responsible for everything that does not work in the system. The authority to push through changes, on the other hand, is not always available to the same extent.
Whether a quality organisation can be effective depends less on the organisational structure than on how leadership sees its own role. Where managers regard quality as their own task and actively support implementation, the quality organisation can have an impact. Where quality is mostly delegated, the head of quality easily remains the bearer of bad news.
Leadership lesson
I keep encountering the assumption that quality can be handled with experience and common sense. Quality is then seen as something you do on the side. “Anyone can do quality” is a fallacy: systematic quality management is a craft with its own tools such as FMEA, 8D, Ishikawa, SPC and MSA. Not everyone masters these methods, but they can be learned, taught and led.
The other side is just as important: quality must not be handed over to a single department. Some ways of thinking still date from the early days of quality management, that is, from the 1920s to the 1970s. At that time, the focus was on inspection by an independent specialist department. This understanding is familiar and has grown historically. But it easily leads to quality being seen as the task of a single department rather than a shared task of all areas.
Quality work in the modern sense therefore requires both: quality management must be integrated into the specialist departments and handled there. Quality management provides methods, tools and enablement; the specialist departments apply them and take responsibility for their share.
Leadership lesson
In my roles, the first step was almost always to set up key figures and reporting so that the situation is visible to everyone. Transparency provides an overview of waste. Anyone who sees it and takes the right measures can reduce more than just failure costs.
In one of my leadership roles, this included a quality strategy with transparent KPI monitoring. Total failure costs fell there by around 50 % within five years. This was not possible through transparency alone. What was decisive was that many specialist departments supported the goals with motivation, took responsibility for their share themselves and implemented the measures independently.
Leadership lesson
Where quality is to be lived across several sites and regions, a shared picture is needed. I have repeatedly developed quality visions with roadmaps and KPI systems, harmonised quality-relevant processes across regions and brought together quality teams from sites and central functions. In doing so, I worked with people from different countries and cultures.
A shared approach also means learning from one another, and the German method is not always the best one.
Leadership lesson
My leadership style is demanding and supportive: high expectations combined with coaching and trust, plus a hands-on mentality and a clear focus on results. When building a quality group for a new product, the team grew from 2 to 20 employees. Developments like this do not succeed through control alone. People need to know what is expected of them and be given the opportunity to deliver it.
Expectations without support create pressure; support without expectations creates stagnation.
All of this leads me to one goal. A mature organisation does not depend on a single position when it comes to quality. The line carries quality itself, top management stands behind it, and quality management is a sparring partner and provider of methods rather than a scapegoat.
This also applies to management systems: parallel systems for quality, environment and energy should merge into one integrated system under the responsibility of top management. I describe what this can look like in the article One Management System Instead of Many Parallel Worlds.
This is exactly where I support companies: with audits, with building and developing integrated management systems, with training and coaching and, where necessary, as an interim manager. Feel free to get in touch.
Let's discuss, without obligation, what this development means for your company.