Quality is a company’s top priority. WRONG!
You probably thought that your company’s mission statement highlighting ‘exceeding customer expectations’ and ‘striving for world-class quality’ was defining the company’s actual priorities. Wrong!
Quality performance has historically been a major differentiator in a company’s performance (sales, customer satisfaction) and for many decades took a great deal of attention from top management to achieve it. As quality levels have improved over time in many industries, strong quality performance is no longer a customer delighter but now only “table stakes” for a company to maintain their market position. Quality performance becomes visible only when you fail. For this reason, companies have fallen into a trap – the have put their quality system on ‘cruise control’. This puts them at high risk.
When you look “behind the curtain”, the reality is often quite different than the company priority statements. Start digging deeper. Take a close look at monthly management review agendas. Is quality the first topic you find? Likely not. Look at the Key Process Indicators (KPIs) and other high-level company metrics. Do you see more than token quality measures, or even any quality measures at all? Often not!
If you do see quality performance represented loudly and clearly: high in management agendas and prominently among KPI’s, congratulations - you work for a quality-focused company. If you don’t, a higher priority is front and center of the attention of top leadership. Financial performance, shareholder value, and/or top-line growth are the priorities of most companies. (Of course, those are the outcomes that keep a company alive, so this should come as no surprise.) That said, a company without the dedication and a robust system to achieve world class quality can also easily fail!
High quality is a prerequisite for businesses these days. For long-term success, it is imperative to set up a system that pushes quality performance to ever-higher levels. However, this does not mean quality is a higher (or even equal) priority compared to financial results - don’t let them tell you it is. Quality performance is quite often a secondary (or lower) priority that most top leadership “want handled” by a different group. Don’t think that top leadership speaking about quality and setting quality initiatives by a defined group pushes it to top priority for the company. It doesn’t. It may be just a side initiative to handle the mess called “quality”.
Spotting the difference between putting quality on cruise control vs. seeing it as a real priority is easy. Your company is REALLY prioritizing quality performance when you see all of these indicators:
1) The top-level company priorities and measures include quality performance
2) A clear quality improvement plan is visible to all employees
3) Management is proactively monitoring quality performance with KPIs
4) Management is swiftly addressing quality excursions (internal and external)
5) Resources are added in areas that address quality, not only financial gain
6) Problems are not only fixed but the deficient systems behind them are corrected
7) Performance in quality is visible to the entire company
If you don’t see nearly all of these things, your company is at risk. A competitor who is truly quality focused will come along and “eat your lunch”. There are ways to combat this reality. CӔDENCE can help you achieve world-class quality, set up a thriving quality system, and push through the typical corporate roadblocks to success. In a future post, we will explore how a top-notch company approaches strategic quality improvement.
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