Welcome to the series of How To:Quality. Your 3 min guide on how Quality Professionals address various business needs to drive Improvement and Governance.
Quality Professionals, regardless of the sector they work in, strive to help businesses achieve their strategic objectives. They do this in various ways: be it deploying governance frameworks, implementing improvement strategies, or delivering assurance programmes.
This month, my blog is aimed at Quality Professionals. We help businesses improve their operational processes. We help them investigate issues and resolve the root cause. We also help organisations address the root cause of their complaints. Abiding by the ethics of our profession, doing the right thing is at the heart of our decisions. With all that in mind, we always provide proposals, action plans, suggestions for things to be done and executed differently. Championing execution is an essential skill. So how would you champion execution?
How to: Quality
I have always been a fan of understanding people’s communication style, their stressors and motivators. I personally follow Everything DiSC® framework. You can read more about it here: How to: Realise your Competative Advantage. The same research offers a different perspective: The Work of Leaders (Wiley, 2013). This book offers insights for leaders to have a Vission, Alignment and Execution, known as the VAE model.
With vision, it explores the improtance of exploration, boldness and testing assumptions. With alignemnt, it talks about clairty, dialogue and inspiration. Execution covers momentum, structure and feedback. Let us explore what the model covers.
It is essential to understand and remember that as a leader you are always serving a group of members, serving a cause you wish to adhere to, or a mission to accomplish. Serving is the key word here.
Before you proceed reading, take a look at your portfolio of work: Assurance findings, Improvement projects and governance tasks. Make sure you have visibility of all the work, innitiatives and activities that you and your team own. Once you have done so, continue reading 👇
Ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What can I defend?
- Who can I advocate for?
- What can I lobby for?
What I like about the book is that it breaks down each question into prompts and provides you with tips for momentum, structure and feedback gathering.
What can I defend?
Think of a criticial process, project, person, policy that requires a hero at this point in time. Could this be a person from the team with strong go-get-it attitude? Would this help move the workd forward? Or would your defense or rallying help a person achieve the work?
✅ Make sure you make the resource available to help progress this particular critical work.
What can I advocate for?
In this approach, you have to switch gears. Think of the hard work that is being done by the team. Who deserves to be praised? What has been achieved thus far? So when you look at your portfolio fo work, look at the work that has been completed, not just the ever ending list of work that still needs to be completed.
✅ Do it now. Write a thank you email to those you indentified. If you have a corporate wide kudos system, do it there. Do not delay it and do not underestimate the power of thank you. coming from a leader.
💡 Remember to to praise and support the quiet ones in the team. If you are a leader of a group of Quality professionals, it is your responsibility to help them recognise the hard work they do. Share it, Appreciate it, Highlight it.
What can I lobby for?
From your entire portfolio of work, what aspects are at risk? This is where you would step in and ensure senior managment, heads of divisions, other teams are brought onboard with the idea. You are lobbying for the work so it picks up momentum again.
✅ Plan your stakeholder enaggement now. Put a visible pathway for you to ensure everyone is aware of the benefit of this criticial innitiative. Make it your agenda.
Think of these three questions as: Propel, Celebrate, Engage.
As a leader you have to ensure you set the right culture for the team and lead by example. In order to do that, you need to underatand what your priorities are as a leader and how they fit with your communication style.
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If you would like to see a particular topic covered in this series, please get in touch and let me know the topic or scenario, and I will do my best to help. You can get in touch on your preferred platform 👇
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