….Empowering culture, prioritising quality
If something is unacceptable on Monday at 10am, it should be unacceptable on Friday at 4pm and that is how organisations build a culture of sustainable quality, good performance and excellence. Prioritising quality and good cultural philosophy is the totality of understanding, applying and ensuring the features and characteristics of a product, service or performance bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs and cultural requirements. Quality management principles always are the fundamentals of beliefs, norms, rules and values that are accepted as true and are embedded in an organisations culture.
Cultural issues remain topmost concern for all organisations to improve or fix. However, a great culture is said to be an execution accelerator which align the people with what the organisation is attempting to accomplish operationally; and when established well, the chances are that it transforms the organisation for improved performance and results. The culture of growth, performance and excellence require that the organisation and its leaders create and maintain the design to focus on creating a climate of emotional safety, enhanced value imperfection, value performance before results, reward innovation and creativity.
With the right culture, the organisation is able to enforce its performance standards to achieve expectations. As mentioned by Taiichi Ohno, without standards there can be no improvement and better performance. This goes to emphasise the need to have clear expectations and letting employees know right from the start what is expected of them to build a culture characterised by cohesive alignment of structures, leadership alignments and the attitude for quality and great performance.
Arguably, in all corporate landscapes, we witness a certain experience of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The intricacies of the business environment as it may be must serve an impetus to build the alignment of the company’s strategy with its culture. A Culture which is deeply embedded and often resistant to change may require that strategic initiatives and principles regarding the business operations be agile and responsive.
Notably, business execution which remains pivotal and an intricate task for leadership require the adoption of a flexible strategy within the context of a stable yet vibrant culture to consolidate and promote quality performance.
However, in a culture of poor leadership, the recipe for poor performance and poor quality is evident. It ought to be the managers’ responsibility to specify the results expected and the levels of skills and competence required to witness breakthroughs. Here, leaders who drive values that drive behaviour drive culture that drive commitment, which further drives engagement that drives performance and eventually, long-term business success remain critical for sustained organisational performance.
What is company culture?
An organisational culture is defined within the parameters of the commitment to a shared purpose, mindset, behaviours and values, which is amplified through the leaders setting the examples and their actions brought together by the organisation’s practices and processes. The amplifying culture of any organisation is apparent in its beliefs, values the way things are done every day, and how it communicates and creates relations with its people and stakeholders.
Culture, as an operational fabric, drives shared behaviours, governance, processes, policies and systems. As an inspirational tool, it promotes purpose, vision, mission, values, principles, ambitions, goals which enhances first hand employee, and leadership experiences of the organisation.
The business leader who is responsible for a whole gang of people he/she probably did not pick may not like and might have nothing in common with and who perhaps will not like him or her much has the task to drive a culture of quality and excellence. The question is, how does he demand from employees’ quality, good performance and excellence?
Ultimately, if leaders want their culture tie to strategy, they stop thinking how the company results affect them and start thinking about how the team members impact the results. One thing is obvious and that is, leaders set the tone for company culture and connecting a company’s culture to its strategy for quality improvement is one of the most difficult challenges a leader will ever face. Apart from its being time consuming and requiring large amounts of energy and effort to witness that transformational change, many leaders and their team are not up to the challenge.
Leading with culture
What are the goals of the organisation, what are its management KPIs, and how are they performing to those goals? Leading with culture is a performance-oriented preamble, affected by the system of work. If the organisation is badly governed, planned and organised, the tendency is that it may not function well – leading to poor performance results. Much more importantly, leading with culture places priority on ensuring the organisation’s values become its performance anchor and guidepost.
That said, it’s important to emphasise that what needs to be done to improve the organisation’s capabilities and fortunes as a business remain culture questions needing answers. For instance, do the employees know the organisation? Are the organisations values integrated into its core processes? Is the organisation demonstrating the values as important as completing task? Does it regularly assess how well they are living the values and address gaps? Do its leaders walk the talk? Does it celebrate its employees that live the values?
It is a fact that successful organisations have an ongoing focus on improvement. It must be noted that their consistent and predictable results are achieved through effective and efficient management of the organisation’s activities with clarity, understanding and management of its interrelated processes and functions which often are guarded by a certain coherent system of strong culture. In reference to how an organisation could be guided by its culture for excellence, it ought to understand that for a sustained success, an organisation ought to prioritise managing its cultural underpinnings and other related variables to optimise significant value and performance impacts.
Prioritising quality through culture performance
The primary focus of quality management is to meet business requirements and to strive to exceed expectations. Leaders at all levels establish unity of purpose and direction and create conditions in which people are engaged in achieving the organisations quality objectives. Competent, empowered and engaged people at all levels throughout the organisation equally are essential to enhancing its capability to create and deliver value
Meanwhile, the key to consciously build the organisation’s structure is to make the process more straight forward. Organisational structure should be seen to provide the backbone for all operating procedures and workflows at any part of the company. It should determine the place and role of each employee in the business, which is key to the organisations development and performance improvement. Besides strong processes that embed quality principles across the organization, ensuring consistency removes friction and obstacles that could lead to a culture of poor quality.
Once again, a clear structure allows every team member to be involved. When employees know what they are responsible for and who they report to, they are more likely to take ownership of their work to build an organisation structure which is culture fit. Organisations that build a culture of excellence ensures individuals and teams are accountable for the quality of their work supported by clearly set standards, governance, metrics and service level agreements.
Nonetheless, lack of proper organisational structure leads to miscommunication, work delays, poor process flows, low morale and other serious consequences that stunt business growth though in contrast, the organisational structure could help to coordinate teamwork, reduce conflicts and boost productivity.
Dimensions of quality
David Garvin intimated 8 dimensions for which every organisation ought to look at quality. These include performance, features, conformity, serviceability, emotional safety, imperfection over perfection, reward innovation and creativity, and loving performance before reward.
With the various dimensions, he emphasised and attributed a product’s primary operating characteristics to its measurable attributes and brands. Quality in respect to features are the demonstrable characteristics of the products and services that enhance and appeal to the end user. Its reliability measures the likelihood that a product will not fail within a specific time period, and this is a key element for users who need the product to work without fail.
Meanwhile, cultural conformity dimension describes the precision with which the product or service meets the specific standards, durability measuring the length of the product’s life, serviceability the speed with which the product can be put into service when it breaks down as well as the competence and the behaviour of the service person. The emotional safety quality requires consistent patterns of behaviour, acceptance that success and failure are inevitable. Though the organisation shares some vulnerabities, it ensures it banishes blame and rather shows and promotes empathy, diversity and inclusion.
David Garvin also argued that valuing imperfection over perfection should be considered normal operating condition as it allows the people, and for that matter the organisation, to reflect, learn and adapt performance. The attitude of a learning culture he emphasised is the constant need to improve on everything within the organisation.
He equally acknowledged rewarding innovation and creativity as key differentiating factors for quality improvement. He emphasised that the world continues to change and that being adaptable to the changing times needs being creative. That said, he opined that demonstrating the difference in capacity to contribute to improving things through innovation fuels and fires personal improvement and growth within the organisation.
Lastly, he pointed to prioritising performance before reward, suggesting that results improve when the organisation and its employees are able to concentrate on skills and the things they can control and influence. By focusing on specific areas of process and contribution, the organisation would be able to measure the genuine impact on what is important to its overall outcomes.
Designing an organisation structure for quality promotion
Quality efforts are largely measured and tracked using metrics that matter and have a clear problem to be solved connected to them. This allows organisations to assess the impact of quality initiatives and make data-driven improvement.
Whatever structure an organisation chooses, it ought to make an effort to implement it. This obviously means that there ought to be a purposeful outline, demonstrating a clear structure, key stakeholder and their responsibilities within and outside the organisation This constitute a plan or guide for implementing an organisational structure that should give a direction. Secondly, there ought to be a defined strategy outlining the medium to long-term strategy and impacts of a successful achievement of plan.
Apart from that, executive and senior leaders must demonstrate a strong commitment to quality principles. By this, clear leadership communication must see to align the people’s efforts toward a common purpose which should enable them to make informed decisions, collaborate more effectively and adapt to changing circumstances and times.
Here, effective communication is necessary for strategy execution because it ensures that everyone involved in implementing the strategy understands what they need to do. They know the expectations and how important they are. Without clear communication, people will misalign and unknowingly derail any quality performance objective. Their roles and responsibilities, timing and sequence of actions ought to be inspected, else it will likely lead to confusion, disengagement and failure to accomplish the required results and expectations. Building an effective quality commitment, advocacy and clarity will empower teams to build and sustain a culture of quality.
Leadership advocacy
Beyond commitment, leaders must also be active advocates for quality principles, leveraging their voice and position to prioritise quality efforts and resources. Leadership must understand that cultivating a culture of quality requires a long-term vision that involves the collective efforts of the entire organisation over time.
As such, a well-defined and documented quality standards guiding decision-making across the organisation is critically advocated. With clear guidance, all team members are empowered to own and lead quality for themselves, make decisions, and voice concerns related to quality. That done, the decision to prioritise quality efforts and resources will no longer remain a subjective issue; instead, the organisation would seek to progressively upgrade its quality and performance based on facts and data that validate its optimised value and impact as well as its culture performance.
Frank is the CEO and Strategic Partner of AQUABEV Investment and Discovery Consulting Group; and Kwabena Otu is the Director & Travel Consultant, DeRoyal Int’l Travel and Tour Ltd.
