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JUST PLANE CULTURE


By Patrick Kinane Y


es, total quality management (TQM) is still around. TQM is simply quality in every aspect of an organization, so it can morph easily. In order to look at this in detail, we have to take two ap-


proaches: pragmatic and psychological. Let’s first look at TQM psychology. I know you don’t


want to hear all this soft and fuzzy mumbo jumbo stuff; you want some tools and techniques that you can use to make improvements. I’ll get to that but there are also many books and articles that address those tangible issues. First, I want to talk about the psychology because all the tools and techniques in the world won’t be of much help if you don’t have the mindset to sustain the effort resulting in the program of the month club. There isn’t any pixie dust that you can sprinkle to make everything perfect. Plug and play is also another concept that doesn’t work. Failure to adopt and adapt the psychological aspects of quality processes is the primary reason why quality initiatives do not have lasting success and get an undeserved bad rap. The psychology is the invisible glue that keeps operations functioning successfully for the duration, and this begins with mutual trust and understanding of the psychological dynamics that moves the workforce. As a maintenance supervisor for a major airline, I had a manager tell me that I think like a mechanic. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment. If you lose


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connection with your workers at their level, you have also lost obtaining any connection in obtaining their cooperation. The command and control management style, popular in the early 20th century, is no longer applicable today but still exists. In the words of W. Edwards Deming, “You can beat horses to run faster — for a while.” This methodology achieves short-term results at the expense of long-term negative consequences. Understanding goes deeper than merely knowing the personalities of the individuals; you must know the personality of the group as well. A company has its own collective personality. Within many


variations such as the geographical differentiations, there is also a shift, departmental and work specialty personalities. You have to ask what reason your workforce would have to cooperate with a quality system, or for that matter, any initiative. Helping the company is an inadequate answer if your work group’s personalities are polarized. Fear, competition and resource scarcity all breed polarization. In any workforce of any size you will never get everyone to cooperate, so you have to concentrate on the key players. If you don’t know your workers, you will not be able to identify your key players. Going back to the question, ‘what reason would your workforce have to cooperate?’ has to do with risk/reward and normative theory. A full study of these models is too lengthy for this article. However, and in a nutshell, groups can


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