Introduction
Be it any improvement strategy, leadership plays it’s immense role in quality management. Leaders are the ones who direct the whole organisation and bring a sense of unity in purpose. Leaders are known for creating and maintaining the internal environment which enables employees to become completely involved in achieving the organization’s goals and objectives. Leaders help in inculcating quality across the organisation, as a leading force sets objectives and in turn assists employees to implement these objectives.
Implementing quality management stays as a condition for quality leadership. Leadership within the organization immensely contributes towards achieving the quality work within the organization, as quality is a factor which does not evolve overnight but it requires utmost dedication of people and companies need to adopt quality practices and policies so that it becomes capable enough to attain a reputation of delivering good quality.
The leading 3 criteria which helps an organization to attain a sustainable quality includes:
• With the support of empowerment, employees are motivated to dedicate themselves towards their work assigned.
• Investing maximum time and efforts in imparting training and developing employees as leaders.
• To attain and contribute towards quality practices such core values need to be reinforced amongst them.
Leaders are responsible for creating a fully productive and progressive environment for business to operate in. They also keep the spirit among the future employees to maintain and prosper a productive environment. It enables an established vision of a business, where leaders stand erect to spread and encourage them to achieve that vision to the rest of the team. Initially devoting some time will prevent one to stay stress free in future.
There exists some valuable tips which can help improve leadership in terms of quality management which includes:
• Leaders need to be proactive rather than only act as a dictator– the actual leaders themselves indulge in doing worthy activities first then lay it as an example to be followed by others rather than only dictating and enabling them to follow other people’s action as an example.
• Proper understanding of the external environment– the leader must eventually understand the external environment which stays dynamic and competitive rather than only being aware about the internal environment alone. Thus the leaders must completely comprehend and react to the changes so experienced in the environment.
• Considering each stakeholder wants– each and every stakeholder be it customers, employees, suppliers or local communities all are engaged in the process of quality management. The leaders cater to each and every need so that it doesn’t affect the organization’s success.
• Clear picture of the organization’s prospects should be established– if a clear view of the organization is kept forward then it would help in planning accurately about the milestones and changing goals of the organization.
• Building of ethical role models and common values– leaders stays responsible for instilling the common values and ethics which stays retrenched in the mission statements of the organization and thus motivating employees to take part in the quality management initiative.
• Building trust and prevention of fear- successful companies supported by efficient leaders helps in developing trust across both the internal and external environment without using fear as a motivation factor. While the employees must be made comfortable to work in the environment which in turns motivates one to add to the success of the business.
• Employees must be equipped with resources and have liberty to strive for accountability– with the efforts and coordination of employees with effective leaders they can together strive to achieve the organization’s goals which would further help to enhance the quality across the board.
• Motivate, inspire and reward their contributions– an effective leader would always contribute by inspiring employees to add their contributions well to the organization and invest their best efforts in quality management initiatives.
• Open and transparent communications- to design and implement the improvement strategies within the organization there is a need on the behalf of leaders to openly and widely communicate with employees taking their innovative ideas and feedback and involving them in the particular process or organization.
• Coach and train employees– lessons imparted to employees with respect to strategies implementation and improvements, employees are able to get a better understanding about the task they are going to perform and the reason for performing such a task.
• Building exigent objectives and targets for employees– if leaders set achievable goals and targets for employees to achieve which help them foster their growth and development across the organization which would in turn contribute to organization’s growth by improving the standard of goals.
Total Quality management– is a corporate perspective that primarily aims towards customers satisfaction by incurring zero defects in products and services.
If leadership is not effective enough then it can obstruct and completely harm the efforts of forming and bringing total quality management.
Wrapping up- Implement clear initiatives and strategies to bring these goals into fruition – once goals have been set, leaders implement these goals accordingly to involve all levels in quality management campaigns across the organisation. A leader is nothing without followers, and people will not follow if they perceive they are being deceived or manipulated. Thus, Leaders need to be at home with the fact that they cannot know all the answers, and that, in fact, there may be no right answer to know.