Note: This file was downloaded from the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Library electronic bulletin board and is presented as received. ----------------------------------------------------Business Index & ASAP------ AUTHOR(s): Feigenbaum, Armand V. TITLE(s): Managing improvement in the U.S. government. (Feigenbaum's Window on the World) Summary: Strong leadership is required to enforce total quality management in the US government. Improvement through leadership is achieved by utilizing the skills of employees and their knowledge and willingness to innovate, solving problems democratically and encouraging teamwork. The characteristics government institutions must consider in order to successfully implement total quality management are leadership with a definite vision to improve, determination in focusing on goals, skill in using human resources and ability to manage accomplishing tasks with teamwork. National Productivity Review p7(4) Winter 1993 v13 n1 The nation's upward expectations for higher levels of federal services together with the sharp downward pressures of deficit reduction can be thought of as the two stresses that affect our federal organizations today. The importance of the total quality initiative in the U.S. government is that it can be the management improvement tool for relieving these pressures. Strong leadership is needed to implement total quality as the fundamental way of managing government improvement, not merely as a loose collection of quality technique projects and a fireworks display of motivational seminars that have so constricted quality development in the past. The group best fitted to help transform the quality effectiveness of the U.S. government consists of the people from the many government institutions. This transformation must be based on the rejection of the false management doctrine that dominated many public--as well as private--sector business organizations throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s. According to that doctrine, good management and successful improvement meant getting the ideas out of the boss's head and into the hands of the workers. The doctrine also called for regular doses of management cheerleading and extensive technique-based seminar programs. Unfortunately, when employees returned to their jobs to use what they had heard, they continued to be faced with ambiguous management processes that they couldn't influence, while having to thread their way through organizations that were filled with departmental silos and while being nickel-and-dimed to death in their work. This is why some of the great companies that were this country's business pacesetters of the 1980s are now urgently searching for fundamental changes in their ways of working and also why some of the admirably intentioned public-sector improvement programs from the Hoover and Grace commissions on down gradually died and were buried without autopsy. Some have explained these failures as a blocking of improvement by an impervious bureaucracy. But that's like Yogi Berra saying that his Yankees would have won every game except that some of them ended too soon. Today we know that good management means reintroducing into the American workplace what the management practices of the 1970s and 1980s overlooked or even purged--that is, the fundamental improvement strength that comes from using the knowledge, skills, and attitudes about the freedom to innovate, about solving problems democratically, and about the value of teamwork that most people bring to their jobs. The improvement focus of many of the private-sector companies that are America's business leaders today is built around a marriage of what might be called a form of organizational populism together with strong management leadership. This kind of management has the quality know-how to establish the organization's plan for improvement and then to implement the practices that help everyone in the organization accelerate quality service and assist their organizations in successfully managing the competitive pressures that face all levels of government, business, and education today. I am often asked to explain the durability of total quality in these times when queasiness about quality continues to grow and when there are generalized discussions about quality but no explanation of the hard-edged improvements that it can accomplish. Total quality is durable because it is the competitive connector today. It connects organizations with their customers, service receivers, employees, and suppliers in difficult times. This brings me to the five characteristics that government institutions must adopt if they are to have successful total quality management today: 1. Leadership with a clear improvement vision. This vision must recognize the fact that an organization's culture is the collective result of the organization's actions and can be affected only by hands-on changes in these actions and a deep confidence in the capabilities of men and women throughout the organization to bring about these changes. It is leadership that creates an organization-wide atmosphere of superior performance, and leadership with a sureness and lightness of touch understands that a good total quality management system works best when you hardly know it's there. Remember that a weak leader is someone from whom employees turn away; a strong leader is someone whom employees turn toward; and a great leader is someone who encourages employees to say, "We did it ourselves." 2. A relentless focus on identifying the goals required for full achievement of the necessary improvement for the organization--never the best-effort incrementalism that just settles for trying to do better than last year. What sets the successful organizations apart is that their goals and the supporting steps are based on analysis and planning by people from the bottom to the top of the organization who really understand the details of what has to be accomplished--not by the traditional executive office bureaucracy. 3. Superior use of human resources through the kind of empowerment that I prefer to think of as organizational flexibility. This is not just an emphasis on increasing employee responsibility in the workplace. It is building among all employees the openness, trust, and multi-channel communication that create the environment for what I think of as individual job entrepreneurship--encouraging people to develop their own forms of teamwork and their own personal ownership of competitive improvement. There is always a better way, and the people who know what it is are the people closest to the work itself. A several-percent quality improvement in jobs throughout an organization compounds at a remarkable rate throughout that organization, and it provides an enormous increase in organization-wide performance. This has been a key to the greatly improved effectiveness of some of America's major new manufacturing leaders, helping these companies not only in preempting Japanese penetration of their American markets but also in accelerating their own penetration of Asian markets. 4. Development and installation of the work and teamwork management processes that drive improvement and that everyone in the organization understands, believes in, and comes to be part of. For example, business analysts who try to understand the underlying reasons for a powerful business upsurge in a conglomerate by reviewing its wide range of products and services will be able to note only the externally visible factors. The even more powerful, invisible-to-the-outsider reason is the effectiveness of its process management from product and service development through purchasing and employee skill development--not merely improvement based on troubleshooters and swat teams. 5. Insistence that what is measured correctly will be managed correctly for improvement, particularly in terms of the three fundamental metrics of user service quality satisfaction, cost effectiveness, and human resource utilization. One of America's strongest equipment companies emphasizes its user satisfaction measurement as the basic key to its strength, and its data show that a user who is happy with them means a six or seven times greater likelihood of repeat sales. Implementing all this means the restoration of quality to a primary role in management. It means relentless emphasis on the organizational forms that encourage the imagination and innovation of the worker in responding to the new service values throughout America and the recognition that to be successful today an organization must become part of the quality of life and environment--not a deterrent to it. And it means a much greater role for quality in American education--particularly by integrating quality into the teaching of economics, engineering, and management. This initiative is not meant merely to focus some attention on quality techniques, to establish a few additional quality courses in our educational structure, or to organize some more quality projects in our organizations. It is nothing less than an unabashed pursuit of excellence at all levels of our quality process in government, business, and education. It is nothing less than providing the framework for the teamwork processes and the implementation tools that help everyone in an organization give the improved quality to service receivers that meets today's accelerating competitive values. That's the total quality road on which the pacesetting quality improvement leaders travel today, and on which all of us can join them to the social and economic benefit of the United States. President of General Systems, Inc. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Ph.D., is the originator of total quality control. He is also founding chairman of the International Academy for Quality Control and the first American to receive France's Georges Borel Prize for preeminence in quality.