Characteristics or Behaviours of Quality Leaders

Successful quality leaders tend to demonstrate the 12 characteristics or behaviours.

They are:

The customers first: Quality leaders give primary importance to both internal and external customers and their needs. Leaders should listen to customers; actively seek their opinion on the value of the products/services; develop a close link with customers; seek joint improvement activity; and lead the handling of complaints.
Value people: Quality leaders take care of the development of people’s skill and capabilities. They enable people to be responsible for the result of their work. They monitor, appraise and recognize people’s performance.
Build supplier partnership: Quality leaders clarify quality to suppliers; audit their capabilities; give feedback; discuss improvements; and support them where needed. They recognize quality improvements made by suppliers and encourage joint improvement action.
Empower people: Quality leaders train and coach the people, rather than directing and supervising them.
Demonstrate involvement/commitment: Quality leaders continually demonstrate their commitment to quality.
Strive for excellence: Quality leaders emphasize continuous improvement rather than maintenance. They strictly believe the statement ‘There is always room for improvement’.
Explain and deploy policy: Quality leaders explain the quality policy to all involved. They set stretching targets and deploy these to business processes, to the functions within the organisation, and to suppliers.
Improve communication: Quality leaders continually improve communications. They establish channels of communication, which are reliable and accessible to everyone in the organisation.
Promote teamwork: Quality leaders promote multidisciplinary teamwork: create involvement; and active participation of everyone.
Benchmark continuously: Quality leaders learn from problems. They continuously do benchmarking and create new learning effects through innovation.
Establish system: Quality leaders establish organisational systems to support the quality effort.
Encourage collaboration: Quality leaders encourage collaboration rather than competition. They emphasize the importance of collaboration among and within functional areas, departments or work centres.