A quality team is a good team of good people. Upgrading the group of people you work with now to a quality team will almost certainly require change. If you already have a quality team, then change is still essential, because quality teams either follow the path of continuous improvement, or they stagnate. In fact, one
of the saddest and most difficult business situations I’ve seen was in a company dedicated to TQM. But after TQM was achieved, senior management slipped on the education effort and in leadership. The result was a bunch of people surrounded by slogans, thinking that they were in a TQM company, feeling that TQM was a disaster or a joke, and not knowing how to work together to achieve quality.
A team is shaped by its leader. If you’re going to lead a quality team, you’re going to have to get yourself into shape. Learning leadership skills—self- awareness, self-control, listening, empathy, and the ability to provide guidance— are essential steps for you. As you learn these skills, you can model them for your team, and the team can learn and grow together.
Looking at it another way, a leader is simply a person who has followers. But to lead them in the right direction, we, as leaders, must be going in the right direction. If the right direction is greater ability to define and deliver quality, then we must cultivate these abilities within ourselves, and cultivate our ability to communicate them to others. When we do this, we become able to improve the quality of our company’s most important asset—its people.
At the same time, followers make a leader. People willing and able to do good work, and also willing to learn, take direction, and grow make a team—and its leader—successful. We need to find such people and, even more importantly, help each person become a highly professional worker and team member.
What do I mean by a good team of good people?
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Each person is good at what he or she does, and capable of getting better.•
Each person is effective at communicating—listening and expression— about the job and about quality.•
The team leader is an effective self-manager who can grow and wants to grow.•
The team leader has an understanding of the surrounding environment and can offer a vision to the team or help the team create a vision, and then lead the team in the right direction.•
The team has effective methods of meeting and communicating to define status, do planning, brainstorm problems, and clear the air.•
The team has the skills it needs to do the job, or can close gaps by learn- ing and hiring.Is it really possible to take the team we have, and turn it into a quality team? The answer is yes, sometimes. It is possible, but it is not easy. And not everyone is up to the task. The underlying question is: Can people change? See the side- barCan People Change at Work?for views on this issue.
We can learn the qualities of leadership so that we can lead our team on the path of becoming a quality team. Here are some best practices:
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Start where we are. Self-acceptance and acceptance of others, without blame, is essential.•
Set clear, attainable goals.Vague slogans and extreme commitments don’t work. Setting a clear goal and taking at least one small step towards it every day works.•
Define and practice your values.Human memory and focus are valuable and trainable. I have written a personal vision, mission, and values state- ment, and I try to read it to myself every day. When I do, it works. I see myself becoming more patient, clearer, and more productive.•
In managing, use a coaching style.The coaching style of management is most compatible with Theory Y—where we believe that your team mem- bers want to do good work—and support them.•
Gain power from genuine qualities.Genuine presence and listening, caring about your team while also caring about good work, gains you respect and is positively infectious. We can build on this through effective reward sys- tems of small rewards for clearly defined goals. Referential power can beEYE ON THE BALL
Can People Change at Work?
Almost all management classes present a paradox—a problem of contradiction—and don’t resolve it. We hear that to succeed as managers, we need to become leaders, and that requires transforming our character. Then we learn that psychologists agree that basic character is established by the age of eight, and we can’t change it. What’s going on?
The answer is that what psychologists mean by unchanging character is very dif- ferent from the qualities of character that we need to have for leadership, which we can learn and develop. For example, say someone is impatient. That is a part of psy- chological character that is very hard to change or unchangeable. But impatience can appear as angry outbursts, or as a controlled drive towards success that helps others be motivated and focused. The difference is training and practice in self-awareness, self-acceptance, acceptance of others, and effective communications, which are all learnable skills.
The Lesson:We can learn and practice leadership. The key skills are difficult to master, but learning and habit change are possible. One part of that is becoming aware of our character—our strengths and weaknesses—and knowing what we can change, and what we can’t change but might instead reshape through self-training.
gained by knowing that quality management works and guiding the team to learn what you know.
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Find best practice resources. In the Resources for Learning section at the end of this book, you will find books about leadership, coaching, and pro- fessional development. Most of them are either adaptations of TQM to self- improvement. Others apply best practices such as Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Peopleand Emotional Intelligence for Business. When we are willing to be the first to change, we can rightly ask others to change along with us. In creating quality teams, we see how many people who, though they seem at first to be utterly unable or unwilling to change, become able and willing to change when given clear direction and a supportive environ- ment. Joining together to become a good team of good people is one of the most rewarding experiences in professional life. It is also darned good for our careers and for the bottom line. Become known as a problem solver leading a team that gets the job done, and see where you go from there!Here are the crucial elements in developing a quality team: