Well you hit this one on the head. Although everyone contributes to quality, someone has to be the leader and have the responsibility on his neck........

Well one thing I can say, i am deling exactly what you put in papaer, our CEO, Managers only think how make mony but any Quality is way down in the list.

Victor

Over the past 30 years I have been around, in, and under just about every industry type, company size, and ownership model out there. In every one, the problems stayed the same, just the names and faces changed. And in every one, the number one problem and the number one solution was always the the same... the Boss.

Like the rest of us, Bosses don't like to to be wrong, and they really hate it when others find out that they were wrong. The good ones, and I have known a couple over the years, use this as an opportunity to walk the talk and do what they expect others to do...admit to their error, accept the responsibility for it, use it as a learning opportunity, and move on. The problems occur when they try to hide the truth, dodge the bullet, dance a little sidestep, or otherwise spin the issue to avoid the consequences of their decisions. The unfortunate fact, however, is that they are all too often able to do just that. Unlike the unBosses, society (and their money) give Bosses a lot more dancing room.

Keep telling them the truth, David. They need to hear it from a voice they can neither influence, intimidate, nor ignore.

Doug Brister, PE
An aging Engineer who was sucked into Quality
when too young to know any better and has
stuck with the Tar Baby ever since...

Many years ago when I first went to work in industry, I was a machine operator. My job was to cut a part to a set diameter on a turret lathe and check every fifth piece with a fixed diameter gauge. I was given a quota of 750 parts/day. The first day, I turned out over 800 parts and could have done many more but for the fact that when I checked every fifth part, they were all wrong and needed to be laboriously hand cut to size.
I thought about this over night and the next morning started checking first every fourth part, then every third and so on until after about fifty parts, I realized the depth stops on the cutter-head were shot and I needed to recut a bunch of the pieces I had already made, as well as check the diameter of each piece frequently as I cut.
Of course, this caused my production to plunge to 250 parts/day. My foreman was furious - even after I explained the problem to him. He said, and I'll never forget this, "So, who promoted you to quality control engineer? You know we have a couple of engineers at the foundry up in Bucks [PA] who get paid a hell of a lot more than either one of us to sort through these parts and toss out the bad ones. That's not your job."
I decided that he was a flaming lunatic although looking back all these years, flaming may not have been the first word that came to mind, and went on about my business producing 250 good parts/day. A day later I got demoted to chip puller by the Vice-President of Production. You see to them the production quota was far more important than the quality and in any case there was no allowance for quality control in their unit budget. Moreover since materials were not included in their budget, they never counted the cost of waste.
In order to make middle management responsible for quality, you have got to also make them responsible for all budgetary items that affect production. Only then can they fully see how their decisions impact quality and productivity.

Excellent article. I have always suggested any place I've worked or consulted, to eliminate the word "Quality" from all job titles. - Quality Director, Quality Manager, Quality Engineer, etc. Everyone thinks it's their responsibility.

Thinking about your example of the baseball players, I wonder what the manager’s response to the situation was? Was he a stand-up boss enough to admit it was his fault during the post-game press conference? Or did he express frustration by saying he didn’t know how that happened to three professionals (how did that get out?), distancing himself from their error? After all, he had trained them in a system to handle that situation and practiced that play many times. And what will he do next? Bench one or more of the players? Re-train them in how to handle that situation using the same system? Or take a corrective action by changing the system for that play to one he hopes will be more effective? Or is no action warranted? I am somewhat conditioned to accept this case as a lack of execution on the player’s part, even though I have the rational understanding that it is the manager’s responsibility to get them to execute, and the more frequently they make an error like this the more my thinking would shift responsibility to the manager. Pretty similar in business and industry – managers need to get players to execute the system. Players have to execute. There’s a reason they call it a team.

Some time during my active career in QA I came across this discussion. There are four factors, called The Four Ms, that enter into the quality of the final product; Machine, Material, Method, Man. Who's responsible for each of them? Machine - it's management who decides what kind of machines will be purchased and utilized to produce a product or service, not the worker. Material - again, it's management who decides what kind of material will be used for a product, or who studies the product specs and orders the appropriate material. Method - here again, management is the organizational unit that controls the review, approvals, and documentation of the methods that will be used, and who encourages or discourages suggestions to refine those methods. This leaves us with Man. I like to think of Man in two aspects, Training and Motivation. Once again, its management who has the say over the training program of the company and who encourages and supports independent learning efforts. So now we're down to Motivation. Here is the one component that rests to a great degree on the workers' shoulders, although Management's attitudes toward workers can impact it significantly. In the end we can see where the person on the front line who is engaged in producing the product or service is only about 10 to 20% responsible for the quality of the final output. Management is responsible for the other 80 to 90%.

I looked forward to my next addition of Quality Digest mainly to read your follow-up. I agree wholeheartedly with your article. I have had the opportunity to see the results of a poor management that did not take responsibility for quality and the privilege to see the results of management that placed quality as a top priority. I have seen first hand what happens in the factory when the Plant Manager or President place a high regard on quality. The commitment absolutely flows downhill and people will rise to meet the expectations. When employee's sense the management commitment and feel what they do is important everything in the production process improves. Earlier in my career I had a Boss who played an active role in the commitment to quality, nonconformances and scrap dropped dramatically, all employee's were involved in the corrective and preventive action process, and customer complaints were nonexistent. Since then I have had several bosses with varying management styles but the worst bosses were complacent and believed scrap, nonconformances & customer complaints were just part of doing business. Unfortunately that philosophy also flows down hill, normally at a much faster speed.