Planning Ahead for Success: Your Personal Quality Program

December 14, 2008 By 4 Comments

We are quickly approaching that time on the calendar when almost everyone resolves to do better on something next year.  Our resolutions are often health, relationship or personal development focused, and while some people make great strides and achieve their goals, many of us fail to stick with our well-intentioned initiatives.  Resolutions tend to disappear like the crowds at health clubs in February.

One compelling way to make resolutions stick and to make real progress is to apply the same quality principles and practices that we use in business to our personal lives through the creation of a Personal Quality Program.  The concept was initially developed by Harry Roberts and Bernard Sergesketter in the book: Quality is Personal—A Foundation for Total Quality Management in 1993, along with several follow-up articles by Sergesketter.

Sergestketter, writing in Quality Progress in August 2004 (subscription or fee required), credits a colleague for highlighting that “while people applied their new found (quality process) knowledge on the job, they rarely use that learning to improve their personal lives.“  His conclusion after trying some examples in his own personal/professional life was that, “The foundation for applying the principles of quality to personal processes is to identify and set standards based on customer need and then measure against those standards.”

Three steps to developing and implementing a Personal Quality Improvement program include:

  • Identifying the items you want to improve.
  • Establishing standards for improvement.
  • Measuring your performance against those standards and tracking your performance on a personal quality checklist.

I had the great fortune to lead an MBA class on Quality Management at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business last quarter, and one of the many outstanding groups in this class chose to create a Personal Quality Program for their project.  They identified items for improvement in three categories: personal, professional and academic.  Personal items ranged from improving nutritional intake to increasing the number of “tuck-ins” of young children during the week.  Professional included job hunting, delegating and managing e-mail more effectively.  Academic goals included reading and class prep and overall performance.

The group developed a checklist, identified their individual areas for improvement and their targeted standards.  They would meet weekly to review progress and performance, provide encouragement and discuss and agree on adjustments to their measures and standards.  To a person, they saw value in the process and positive outcomes in all three areas during the eight-week process.

With thanks for their efforts and their debrief, I offer their very well thought-out conclusions and advice with complete attribution going to this talented group of professionals:

  • View your day through a Quality lens.  Each day consists of a series of processes that can be improved.  Continuous improvement is not limited to businesses or formal organizations: it can also contribute to a more fulfilling professional and personal life.
  • Identify processes from your personal and professional life that you would like to improve.  These processes should be measurable and with purpose.  Process improvement should ultimately benefit you and/or your customer.  Focus on no more than 10 of these processes at a time
  • Choose a standard for each process that you wish to improve.  (Note: the group focused on successes, while you may choose to focus on measuring defects.)  Put together a Personal Quality Checklist that fits your measuring preferences, including frequency of measurement (daily, weekly etc).
  • Use your checklist.  Keep your checklist handy and track your progress.

And their final suggestion: Don’t get discouraged.  If you need additional motivation, sharing your checklist with others helps add accountability.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Take some time this week to think about areas that you would like to improve in your personal and professional lives.  There’s no reason to not put the well-established quality and process improvement practices that you use everyday in your job, to work on improving your own personal and professional performance.  Whether your goal is to increase quality time with your family, reduce unproductive time at work, better manage your e-mail, or lose 10 pounds, using the principles and processes of quality management can help you succeed.

See you in February at the health club!

Note: I’ll be back with some more suggestions and possibly some Quality Checklist templates as we get closer to the end of the year.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measurements Include a Warning Light?

November 7, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Count me as one of the last idealists.  Or perhaps the last of the naïve idealists.  In a world filled with Quality Management Systems and Performance Measurement techniques backed by legions of people trained to implement and sustain quality performance, it seems reasonable to me that organizations are capable of not only keep themselves from imploding, but that they are armed to the teeth with tools to ensure prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of  Dr. Deming.

As an aside, Dr. Deming once famously indicated that it was his hope that his legacy was to keep U.S. companies from committing suicide.  Perhaps it is good that he is not here to see the firms elbowing each other out of the way in an attempt to get to the front of the line on the edge of the cliff.

  • The U.S. auto companies are almost finished carrying out their joint suicide pact in a world where the rules for success as an automobile company are on display for everyone to see.
  • Motorola, an icon of U.S. electronics has systematically destroyed itself by flailing and flailing in the mobile device (read: cellphone) world, and stands a reasonable chance of failing to survive without drastic action.   (See my earlier post on the Dollar Bill Auction to get a feeling for Motorola’s problems.)  The fact that Motorola is a Baldrige winner, one of the founding fathers of Six Sigma and an organization staffed with brilliant engineers, yet it cannot seem to engineer success is both puzzling and frustrating.
  • Earlier this week, Boeing indicated that they would again delay the launch of its now several years late and much hyped 787 Dreamliner.  The article indicated that the latest problem had to do with quality issues related to a new type of fastener required for the high tech and lightweight materials being used in the plane.  The advance sale of 900 of these puppies at $178 million a piece and the expected 20% fuel consumption savings has customers hopping mad over this latest in a series of seemingly endless project management and supply chain problems.
  • Financial services, banking, investment banking.  Ugh.  These icons of risk management succeeding in maximizing risk beyond their wildest expectations.

How does this happen in a world filled with balanced scorecards and legions of certified quality professionals constantly measuring, monitoring and striving to improve performance?  I suspect that my own answer is that while we have ample tools available for our use in building, the one tool that we haven’t yet mastered is staring back at us in the mirror.

In discussions and lectures with the up and coming generation of leaders, there is widespread cynicism over the intentions and the capabilities of many of their firm’s senior leaders.  There is little faith expressed that their leaders understand their firm’s key drivers and little confidence that the leaders are taking actions and measuring performance based on anything other than preconceived notions of what they think is right.  Fewer organizations than you might think are doing anything to engender employee satisfaction…which is ironic given the mountains of data that indicate that employee satisfaction flows through to customer satisfaction and strong financial performance.

This current generation of senior leaders is failing, and the very imbalanced scorecard is visible all around us.  The business cycle is one thing, but our problems go way beyond the business cycle to our preconceived notions of how to lead, how to run businesses, how to fuel innovation and how to create an environment where talent and calculated risk-taking are carefully cultivated.

Many organizations are hives of activity with no vector and the output is chaotic. Firms and top leaders need to quit guessing and start using the tools available to identify key business drivers and to measure and monitor the efforts and outcomes of focusing on those drivers.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned crisis to engender creativity.  Well, we have one.  In spite of the difficulties, it’s a great opportunity for organizations and leaders to quit paying lip-service to cliché’s like customer-satisfaction, performance excellence and quality.  It’s a big world with a growing population and while the forecast is stormy now, the seas will eventually calm and the sun will shine.  It will be interesting to see who has the courage and fortitude to do the things necessary to make it through the storm.  Even money that we find a whole new generation of leaders in the process.

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Surviving Lousy Leaders Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,