Moving Quality Beyond Product - Excellence in Everything

Sunday, June 24, 2012
Posted by Dr. Manu Vora, ASQ CQE, Fellow

Quality is not about tools and techniques. A better approach for any organization is: Why Quality Matters, What Quality Means, and How to Achieve Quality (tools and techniques).

A holistic model of quality management should focus on Excellence in Everything that an organization undertakes.

• The journey of excellence starts with Leadership. Ethical, inspiring, and visionary leaders create unique culture that nourishes creativity and innovation in employees to serve and delight their customers. 
• Organization is committed to dynamic strategic planning by engaging employees and deploying key strategies by staffing with right talent and ongoing reviews. 
• Organization creates and executes customer-focused processes to understand and anticipate customer expectations,  needs, and wants. 
• Organization is truly committed to measuring and managing performance through critical metrics and effective knowledge management.
• Organization seeks out great talent with positive attitude, engage and retain the talent through involvement  (new employee orientation, mentoring, teamwork, and meeting management), motivation (recognition and employee suggestions), and development (education and training, performance feedback, coaching, and employee surveys with actions). 
• Organization is systems focused with employee mindset of continual improvement.
• Organization is committed to achieve business results to delight all stakeholders in a socially responsible ways. 

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Award Winners subscribe to Excellence in Everything they do. We can learn a great deal by examining best practices of these role model organizations in achieving performance excellence.

I encourage you to share your thoughts on moving quality beyond product.