----------------------------------------------------Business Index & ASAP------ AUTHOR(s): Covey, Stephen R. TITLE(s): Principles of total quality. (part 4)(from the book, Principle-Centered Leadership) Summary: Total quality management involves the planning and implementation of strategies designed to improve personal and professional development, interpersonal relations, managerial effectiveness and organizational productivity. On an interpersonal level, total quality requires investing time and energy into fostering healthy and positive relationships with others based more on trust and faith than on fear. On the managerial level, total quality fosters win-win situations, not win-lose scenarios that create rivalries. Understanding the employee's perspective leads to loyalty and credibility. From an organizational perspective, total quality requires a human principle-oriented approach that endorses cooperative work habits and is guided by feedback from customers in addition to empathy for their buying habits and motives. Modern Office Technology p10(1) Feb 1992 v37 n2 DESCRIPTORS: Management Management Style Feedback Quality Control Leadership Strategic Planning Interpersonal Communication Organization Structure Books The paradigm of total quality is continuous improvement. No person or company should be content to stay where they are, no matter how successful they now seem to be. And very few people or companies could possibly be content with the status quo if they were regularly receiving accurate feedback on their performance from their stakeholders. 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; and 4) organizational productivity. Personal and professional development. You and I are the keys to total quality. It's what I call an inside-out approach to quality. Inside out means to start first with yourself - your paradigms, character, and motives. This approach often requires personal change - not personnel changes. W. Edwards Deming has said that about 90 percent of the problems in organizations are general problems (bad systems); only about ten percent are specific problems with people. Many managers misinterpret such data, supposing that if they then correct the structure and systems (programs), the problems with people (programmers) will go away. The reverse is actually true: if you correct the ten percent first, the other problems will go away. Continuous improvement basically means you never are content with something being half-right. Your customers certainly won't be content. And if you are getting accurate feedback from them, you will be motivated and challenged to improve. Interpersonal. Total quality on an interpersonal level means making constant deposits into the emotional bank accounts of others. It is continually building good will 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. A corporate culture, like the human body, is an ecosystem of interdependent relationships, and these must be balanced synergistically and based on trust to achieve quality. Managerial. 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. Win-win thinking creates teamwork. Win-lose thinking creates rivalry. We need internal unity to get win-win cooperation, loyalty to the mission, constancy of purpose. Most people search for quality in techniques, practices, and processes; they don't realize that quality requires a whole different explanation of the role of management. People must know that they are being managed by principles and entitled to due process. Management's job is empowerment. If you want to influence and empower people, first recognize that they are resourceful and have vast untapped capability and potential. Understand their purpose, point of view, language, concerns, customers, boss. Be loyal. Maintain credibility. Organizational. 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. I recommend that every organization develop a stakeholder information system - a feedback system or database on what shareholders, customers, employees, communities, suppliers, distributors, and other parties want and expect. I also suggest that every organization develop synergistic relationships with customers and suppliers. There is a place for competition, but it's not in areas where you need to cooperate. 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 essence of total quality is empathy with customers, is empathy with their motives and buying habits. Everything is guided by feedback from customers - both internal and external - and from other stakeholders. The key to total quality is to listen to your stakeholders, to seek first to understand, then to be understood. Stephen R. Covey Stephen Covey's best-seller, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People," sold one million copies and is still going strong. This is the last of four excerpts from his latest book, in which he tells how to achieve personal fulfillment and professional success through principle-centered leadership. From "Principle-Centered Leadership" by Stephen Covey.