Quality Managers of the Future

The profession of quality management is dividing, as did the profession of human resources management, into the operational and strategic.  As in the human resource management field, both roles are necessary, although strategic may be more “fashionable” than operational.

There is the management of quality and the quality of management.  We can never ignore the management of quality.  The towels must be clean and the wings must stay on the airplane, be it Indian Airlines, Jet Airways or Sahara Airlines.  But operational management of quality only gets us into the game.  It prevents non-quality.  It provides the basis to create a quality experience.  We do not get off a Mumbai to Calcutta flight and say “Great quality flight experience, the wings did not come off”.  On the other hand, however wonderful the service, the loss of a wing mid-air would be indisputably a negative quality experience.

One of the founding fathers of management theory, Igor Ansoff, differentiated the nature of managerial decisions between the operational, administrative and the strategic.  An operational decision about a strategic problem will not address the problem.  We have had this wisdom passed forward in the nature of the familiar differentiation between efficiency and effectiveness.  Efficiency is doing things right.  Effectiveness is doing the right things.  It is better to do the right things inefficiently, than it is to do the wrong things efficiently.

The manager of the quality of management is an emerging, strategic role.  It is different from that of the operational manager of quality but shares some common features:

Discipline – If you can measure it, you can better manage it.

Action – Managers understand that things do not improve when they are thought about or planned about, but when action is taken.

Understanding – Managers know that in cross-functional interdependent organizational systems, fixing a problem in one area may not fix the problem at all, but simply shift it somewhere else.

The quality manager –  the manager of the quality of management – must be educated and developed in a broader way than we have done in the past.  He or she should have a background in systems and problem solving techniques, with an ability to converse across the business excellence landscape.  The business excellence manager should be able to describe, audit and prescribe improvement interventions in leadership, customer service, financial strategy and other areas with National Quality Award frameworks.  Be it the IMC Ramkrishna Bajaj National Quality Award or the CII Exim Business Excellence Award.

These are our quality managers of the future.