# 613    Innovative Leader           Volume 14, Number 2                 April-June 2005

An Assessment of the Quality Mandate
by Ira Smolowitz, Ph.D.

Dr. Ira Smolowitz is Professor of Finance and Dean, Bureau of Business Research and Program Development at American International College, Springfield, MA. Phone 413-205-3369.

Just-In-Time (J-I-T) inventory control requires that a manufacturer operate with lean inventory. There are virtually no back-up parts in the warehouse. Parts arriving at the loading dock must meet pre-determined quality standards. The mentality that we will replace defective parts with good parts from the warehouse is a mentality that does not support J-I-T. Remember, it’s Just-In-Time not Just-In-Case. A natural foundation of J-I-T is the implementation of a corporate-wide quality mandate. Quality is everyone’s responsibility.

It has been argued that corporations should eliminate their formal ‘quality control department.’ The establishment and use of this department symbolically suggests to employees that quality is the responsibility of the above department. In reality, quality is everyone’s responsibility. A company that has successfully utilized J-I-T is Toyota. In the January/February 2005 issue of Business 2.0, Toyota was declared ‘the smartest company of the year.’ One of the tenets of the Toyota production system is Andon (Line Stopping) – any worker can halt the line to fix a problem. Workers shouldn’t be afraid to do so.

In essence, Toyota has empowered its workers. By doing so, quality becomes everyone’s mandate. As a consequence, quality permeates the organization.

I accept and fully appreciate the above scenario. Consider, however, the following counter-intuitive research findings:

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmonson and her colleagues recently studied healthcare workers to better understand the challenges associated with acquiring new knowledge in complex, results-oriented organizations. Her work is fascinating because the insights she gleaned contradict both conventional wisdom and the patterns of employee behavior that many companies encourage and celebrate.

For example, most companies value employees who take it upon themselves to solve problems without comment or complaint. In a hospital, if a nurse finds an unmade bed, the intuitive “best” response – taking individual initiative – involves fetching linens and making the bed.

So should you start handing these self-starting workers employee-of-the-week awards? Hardly. As anyone steeped in the lessons of the total quality movement will tell you, solving problems quietly and independently is the worst possible way for your staff to respond if you want to improve business processes.

When a Toyota car comes off the assembly line with a paint defect, the answer isn’t to fix the problem so neither the customer nor the factory manager notices; the best response is to identify and remedy the root cause of the problem so it won’t happen again. Instead of rewarding the quiet fixers, smart companies encourage noisy (but substantive) complainers who perform a critical service by bringing quality issues to the fore.

Edmondson’s research generated another counterintuitive result. Yes, eliminating layers of workplace supervision is consistent with an emphasis on efficiency, individual empowerment, and worker accountability. But for purposes of organizational learning, its counterproductive. Removing managers leaves front-line people with more to do – and much less time to reflect on and learn from experience. Second, managers usually have the broader perspectives and more connections to other parts of the company, so they often see where problems originate and how they might be solved.

My assessments of the issues demarcated in my article are:

(a) It is not enough to empower a corporation’s workers. Quality requires the equivalent of whistleblowing. An employee discovering a failure to meet a quality mandate must not only attempt to individually correct the problem but alert (blow-the-whistle) so that others linked to the root cause of the problem can correct and, therefore, prevent a recurrence of the problem.

(b) If a lean organization is at variance to maximizing corporate learning, downsizing/lay-offs are counterproductive. Downsizing: (1) demoralizes the survivors; (2) interrupts communication channels; (3) overloads the survivors; and (4) permits knowledge and training to exit with the downsized employee. To me, quality is an evolving standard. An evolving standard requires multi-faceted inputs. A lean organization is hard-pressed to provide the requisite input.

References:

1 Migliorato, Paul, “Toyota Retools Japan,” Business
2.0, August, 2004, p. 41

2 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, “How Companies Get Smart,”
Business 2.0, January/February 2005, p.74