How To Get A Standing Ovation From Your Customers—Successfully Managing Continuous Improvement

How To Get A Standing Ovation From Your Customers—Successfully
Managing Continuous Improvement

Despite its many false starts, skeptical reactions and misconceptions, the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement has begun the slow process of changing the way
we do business both here and abroad.

At an ever increasing rate, our customers are not only requesting, but
demanding, that we provide more “customer service” for less money. If we decide that we wish to remain financially viable and to continue doing business successfully in these markets and segments, we must come to grips with the fact that this challenge is not just a short-term “problem” that will go away by
itself when the economy turns around. At the risk of using an over used phrase, all indicators seem to be pointing out that this is in fact a real paradigm shift and that it is absolutely here to stay!

Questions and concerns naturally arise…how much will our fundamental way of
doing business need to change in order to “just stay even” with the competition…will we be able to outperform our competitors…exactly what am I going to have to adjust in my own behavior and management style in order to get ever increasing results from the organization…am I willing to pay the price necessary both personally and organizationally in order to compete?

As you can see, the questions for how to get totally satisfied customers must be initiated from the customer’s point of view. By choosing to first see the world from their eyes and not our “organizational” eyes, we get a much better understanding of what the organization has to do rather than what we may already be doing. Learn to be more proactive in getting yourself and your organization to “be the customer” while evaluating your products and services.

Since the goal of this article is to be informative yet brief, I will give you 6 general ways to start transforming yourself and your organization into a quality machine that is always improving. However, it is important for me to stipulate
that an organization cannot and will not effectively evolve if the executive leadership is not completely committed to improving quality. More of what that entails will have to be the focus of a separate writing.

6 Ways to approach increasing quality in an organization:

1. Facilitate a more rapid progression towards quality through the use of repetition to build the behavioral and management skills your managers and allow them to more readily develop those skills.

2. Reduce management and supervisor frustration by developing a positive, results-oriented attitude within each manager, thereby creating a more positive and motivating organizational environment.

3. Develop overall management and leadership skills such as open and honest communication, delegation skills, coaching, planning, problem solving, time management, leadership and motivation.

4. Provide a system of goal setting and action planning with managers so as to permit the achievement of management’s objectives in conjunction with the Quality Management System.

5. Crystallize and communicate organizational objectives while monitoring progress and providing a systematic approach to effective time management toward reaching these goals and objectives. This will raise the level of each manager’s success and reducing frustration.

6. Integrate the goals of the organization with the personal goals of the managers, thus creating an environment of motivation and mutual commitment.

As you can well imagine, some of these goals will be easier to implement than
others but for all of them the time and effort will be greatly rewarded. The real objective is to have quality as a way of life for the organization and to have the improving of that quality a process that is defined and includes activities for every member of the organization.

Kirk Chadrick
CEO of Presence Consulting