ASQ InfVoices – Quality Professional and Leadership

The November topic of ASQ Influence Voices was come from Mr. Bill Troy idea about “Every quality professional, a leader”. He would like to know do you are quality leader and what kind of leadership training did you receive and was it enough? For Quality Leader, my answer is “yes” and “no”. In quality society, I am a quality leader to service Hong Kong Society for Quality for over 17 years; but in my own company, my post is a quality manager. That post has a certain distance to connect with the C-suite. Talking about Leader, Steve Jobs is one of real leaders in the world.

Before discuss with Steve Jobs, I had reviewed almost all ASQ certificate BOK in 2007 and summarized in the following table. Unbelievable! The body of knowledge (BOK) in leadership training was only found in CMQOE and CQE, in which content are about 17% and 9%, respectively. So little portion of leadership content was included in our official certification training!

On the other hand, leadership is not only trained but also depends on people’s personality. One of ways to realize your leadership is suggested to service in quality society voluntarily. You will have a chance to lead a sub-committee and deploy your planning, as well as, verify your leadership skill.

Lastly, I would like to connect leadership and quality through Steve Jobs wisdom statements classified on leadership.
i) My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. (Ref. p.54)
ii) My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself. <Times>, 1999
iii) My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: one person never does great things in business; they’re done by a team of people. <60 Minutes>, 2003
iv) The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. <Macworld>, 2004

It could be summarized that Leadership need a team work (Soft skill / Communication), to motivate people to be better and the best (Coaching skill), to create a space and remove obstacle for your team to do their best (Management skill). I would like to conclude the relationship between Leadership and Quality in the simple way below:
Quality is to make things better.
Leadership is to make people better.
Therefore, Leadership is Quality on People.

Reference:
A View from the Q - http://asq.org/blog/
Alan Ken Thomas (2011) “The Business Wisdom of Steve Jobs” Wealth Press.