Chapter 9: Empowerment and Quality

Chapter 9: Empowerment and the Quality Imperative

• The chapter discusses empowerment in the workplace and the quality imperative.
• Learning objectives include identifying practical steps for empowering others and developing a high-performance workplace, understanding the historical roots of the quality movement, and improving performance through quality initiatives.
• Empowerment in the workplace is defined as expanding employee knowledge, tasks, and decision-making responsibilities.
• Employee participation consistently has a positive impact on business success.
• Employee ownership of stock, combined with participation, can motivate employees.
• Questions to diagnose the need for empowerment include employee disinterest, high absenteeism/turnover rates, low loyalty/team spirit, communication breakdowns, lack of pride, excessive costs due to waste/inefficiency, and product/service quality issues.
• Empowerment is driven by efforts to improve performance.
• Global competition creates complex paths to success.
• Strong management is needed to overcome significant obstacles, while employees address smaller obstacles.
• Jack Welch, a General Electric CEO, emphasized four essential leader qualities: high personal energy, ability to energize others, edge in making tough decisions, and ability to execute strategy.
• Welch's leadership emphasized and reformed company practices and culture, including eliminating bureaucratic management and introducing the workout process.
• He also promoted the spread of ideas across the company and rewarded innovation and implementation.
• Welch encouraged borrowing ideas from other companies.
• Principles for an empowered workplace include trusting employees to achieve organizational goals, viewing employees as the most valuable resource, recognizing accomplishments and using symbolic rewards to show appreciation for employees, and decentralizing decision-making.
• Decision-making should be located where the information and the customer are.
• The text stresses the collaborative nature of work, emphasizing that teamwork leads to better outcomes.
• Table 9.1 and 9.1.2 outline distinct examples of workplace decision-making styles in "Unempowered", "Out of Control," and "Empowered" scenarios.

Importance of Communication

• Accurate, timely, and thorough information, most preferably from immediate supervisors, is crucial to employees.
• Effective leaders communicate constantly, even outside of verbal interaction.
• Closed office doors can communicate a negative impression.
• Tailoring communication to specific audiences is key to successful leadership.

Filling the "Need to Know" Gap

• Employees need a clear understanding of the company's grand plan (purpose, values, strategies), personal expectations, and regular performance feedback.
• Effective communication is crucial to meet this need, with a top-to-bottom approach vital for consistent messaging.
• Leaders are accountable for effective communication throughout the organization to ensure that everyone understands their expectations.

Communication Problems and Solutions

• Seven key rules for effective meetings include scheduling meetings only when necessary, setting objectives and agendas in advance, inviting appropriate participants, providing relevant materials, and selecting convenient meeting times and locations to boost productivity.
• Leaders must consider elements like communication distance and emotional factors or trust.
• Meeting size, structure and conflicts are also important elements affecting communication.

Leadership Challenge

• Rene McPherson emphasizes employee well-being, highlighting people as the most important asset.
• Leader characteristics and behaviors are seen as crucial, and Rene McPherson emphasizes that leaders must genuinely value and respect their employees for effective leadership.

Leadership Challenge, 2

• Colin Powell's leadership principles include having a vision, being demanding, checking on small details, crediting the team, being calm and kind, fixing mistakes, and maintaining optimism.

The Quality Movement

• Global competition requires companies to focus on quality.
• Consumers demand high-quality products and services.
• A talented, committed, and empowered workforce is necessary to meet increasing demands.

The Quality Movement, 2

• Key ingredients of quality management are participatory leadership, continuous process improvement, and effectively using groups to solve problems.
• Experts performing their jobs are necessary for quality management, impacting personal development within a company.
  • Quotes from recognized industry figures are used within the text to enhance the quality of the information provided.

W. Edwards Deming

• Deming made significant contributions to the quality movement, particularly by influencing Japanese restructuring.
• His award, the Deming Prize, recognizes outstanding contributions to quality control.
• Deming's influence expanded from educating production staff on statistical quality control to motivating management to focus on personal commitment to quality.
• Deming emphasized building quality into products, thus saving costs and time in the long run by reducing production errors.
• He also stated the importance of having good systems and process, consistent purpose, and statistical measurements to reduce production variation.
• He championed teamwork across workers and managers.

W. Edwards Deming, 2 & 3

• The Deming Chain Reaction diagram illustrates the feedback loop: quality and improved efficiency leading to higher market satisfaction and business success.
• Deming emphasized the importance of consistency, high standards, minimizing dependence on inspection for quality, reducing supplier counts, acknowledging system-level quality issues, improved job training, and robust supervision to improve company outcomes.
• Deming emphasized the importance of breaking down department barriers, avoiding fear with open communication, eliminating numerical goals and slogans, employing statistical methods, removing barriers, providing training, and emphasizing management commitment.

Philosophical Roots of the Quality Movement

• Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management laid the foundation for industrial engineering and modern management.
• His creation of the monetary incentive system formed the basis for scientific management.

Scientific Management and the Model-T

• Henry Ford's assembly line revolutionized manufacturing by placing machines and workers in a sequence to assemble cars without interruption, significantly improving efficiency.
• This led to a massive decrease in chassis assembly time from 13 hours to 1.5 hours.

Human Relations School

• Harvard University's research at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant revealed the significance of social factors and group norms in motivating and driving productivity, overshadowing the importance of financial incentives.
• Social issues and norms more heavily influenced worker motivations and performance than physical conditions, finances, or even task security.

A Human Relations Pioneer

• William Procter believed that workplace psychology influenced workplace productivity and proposed an employee stock ownership plan that encouraged workplace investment.
• The benefits of this plan included improved worker loyalty, increased productivity, and enhanced brand reputation.

Experiments in Participative Management

• Several organizations, including Texas Instruments, AT&T, General Foods, and Proctor & Gamble, experimented with participative management approaches.
• Techniques included work simplification, job enrichment, team-based operations, and group work, which contributed to improving productivity and morale.
  • Case studies from various organizations have been highlighted to illustrate successful outcomes.

Experiments in Participative Management, 2

• Effective participative management shared common characteristics, including positive management attitudes toward workers, viewing employees as valuable assets, improving worker scope and responsibility, providing human relations and problem-solving techniques, and establishing pathways for advancement.

Quality Synthesis

• Quality improvement philosophies acknowledge both classic and behaviorist management approaches, acknowledging the balance between structured and social management approaches.
• The synthesis of different views in management produces both a practical and a flexible approach to problem-solving and efficiency improvement.
• This diagram highlights the integration of scientific and human relations perspectives.

Improving Performance through Quality Initiatives

• U.S. companies recognized the need for adopting total quality management approaches to achieve world-class standards in product and service quality.
• The traditional method focused on final inspection, whereas total quality management emphasizes prevention-based strategies.
• Total quality management models achieved improvements in business productivity, employee relations, productivity, customer satisfaction, market share, and profitability.
• Several business examples and positive quantifiable results were reported in the text.

Improving Performance through Quality Initiatives, 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 7

• Adoption of total quality management resulted in measurable improvements in areas, including overall business productivity, and fostering better employee relations, and higher productivity, greater customer satisfaction, increased market share, and significantly improved profitability. Companies successfully using total quality management methods emphasized priorities on meeting customer needs, incorporating company values into operations, training and empowering employees, integrating systematic procedures to promote ongoing improvement and providing positive reinforcement as key components for increasing performance.
• The success of TQM initiatives demonstrates that a shift in company focus and practices can produce significant positive effects for various components of the organization.
• The intrinsic philosophy of TQM involves a shift in paradigm which emphasizes that continuing to perform actions in the same way will result in maintaining the same outcome.

Continuous Improvement Today

• Contemporary quality initiatives rely on various tools such as Six Sigma quality (statistical tools for analyzing product defects), Lean manufacturing (approach to improving business performance), and well-conceived, communicated and executed checklist procedures.
• Formalized quality standards, like ISO standards, further promote global quality, industrial and commercial prosperity through formalized quality standards.
• Continuous improvement involves using accurate data, meaningful analysis, and creative thinking, with detailed measurement of input and outputs as vital components of an improved workflow.

Continuous Improvement Today, 2 & 3 & 4

• Modern continuous improvement involves standardized performance in various areas such as customer focus, leadership emphasis, employee relations, process improvement, management systems, continuous process improvement, data-driven decision making and mutually beneficial supplier partnerships. These standards help successful businesses continue to build their performance, productivity and long-term stability. Successful initiatives to improve product and service performance demonstrated management commitment, employee buy-in, detailed training, practices execution and consistent positive reinforcement.