9.2 Leadership and Empowerment

What is a quality management system?

Leadership:

		As Joseph M. Juran said in 1945, "It is most important that top management be quality-minded.
		In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below."

		A large percentage of quality problems are associated with management, not technical issues.
		Leaders establish unity of purpose and direction of the organization. They should create and maintain
		the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's
		objectives.

Key benefits:

		As Joseph M. Juran said in 1945, "It is most important that top management be quality-minded.
		In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below."

		People will understand and be motivated towards the organization's goals and objectives.
		Activities are evaluated, aligned and implemented in a unified way.
		Miscommunication between levels of an organization will be minimized.

9.2 Leadership and Empowerment

Applying the principle of leadership typically leads to:

		Considering the needs of all interested parties including customers, owners, employees, suppliers,
		financiers, local communities and society as a whole.
		Establishing a clear vision of the organization's future.
		Setting challenging goals and targets.
		Creating and sustaining shared values, fairness and ethical role models at all levels of the organization.
		Establishing trust and eliminating fear.
		Providing people with the required resources, training and freedom to act with responsibility and
		accountability.

Employee Empowerment:

		Part of the TQM philosophy is to empower all employees to seek out quality problems and correct them.
		With the old concept of quality, employees were afraid to identify problems for fear that they would be
		reprimanded.
		Often poor quality was passed on to someone else, in order to make it "someone else's problem."
		The new concept of quality, TQM, provides incentives for employees to identify quality problems.

9.2 Leadership and Empowerment

		In TQM, the role of employees is very different from what it was in traditional systems.
		Workers are empowered to make decisions relative to quality in the production process.
		They are considered a vital element of the effort to achieve high quality.
		Their contributions are highly valued, and their suggestions are implemented.
		In order to perform this function, employees are given continual and extensive training in quality
		measurement tools.
		To further stress the role of employees in quality, TQM differentiates between external and internal
		customers.
		External customers are those that purchase the company's goods and services.
		Internal customers are employees of the organization who receive goods or services from others in
		the company.
		For example, the packaging department of an organization is an internal customer of the assembly
		department.
		Just as a defective item would not be passed to an external customer, a defective item should not be
		passed to an internal customer.