Quality is an often overlooked and misunderstood concept.  For many of us, poor quality is easily identified – receiving the wrong food order, waiting too long for service, product breaks under normal use, etc.  But good or high quality is often much more difficult to identify or define, much less produce on purpose.

While there may be many different approaches to take in pursuing high quality, nearly all of them share a few fundamental concepts.  Perhaps the most important to recognize is that it takes teamwork to improve an organization.  For over a hundred years, we have learned from some of the most successful quality-oriented organizations across the globe that achieving high quality is directly linked to highly effective and efficient team work.  Teams must be focused, purposeful and aligned in order to be successful.

Another fundamental concept to improving quality is accepting and truly embracing a philosophy of continuous improvement.  While this is easy to speak about and promote in meetings and conference rooms, it just might be the most difficult challenge to overcome in any organization.  Many of us take pride in what we do and think we are better than our competition, or at least good enough to earn our pay and perhaps even accolades for our efforts.  There is also a segment of people that interpret the question, “How can we improve?” as a comment of destructive criticism.  These can present a real obstacle to embracing the continuous improvement philosophy, for each member of the organization must recognize that continuous improvement is ultimately how we continuously evolve.  And it is common knowledge that if we stop evolving, we will rapidly be overcome by our competitors in business.  It is critical to be exceedingly truthful in assessing performance and we need to be open and accepting of constructive feedback in order to improve.

Data Driven Decisions serves to maximize the return on our efforts while minimizing our risk of poor decisions or worse (e.g. negligence, ignorance, willful manipulation).  The only way to truly know that we have improved is to measure the process before and after our efforts to improve and compare the results.  Data can provide insight into our performance and direct our attention towards the most likely areas to benefit from the efforts of our limited resources.

While it may be challenging to see the forest for the trees in your organization, we can coach your organization to measurable quality improvements through embracing these simple concepts.