Quality is on Everyone’s Minds

Everyone is concerned with how to attain quality, how to keep it and how to be known for it. Quality is seen as the factor that can distinguish your agency from its competitors.

In many ways, quality might seem elusive or, at best, hard to measure. And it is easy to determine when quality is missing. We are all drawn to people, companies, products and services that exude quality.

What characteristics do consumers look for when determining a company’s quality? Among the answers: service, reputation, consistency, integrity, commitment enthusiasm, authenticity, reliability and availability.

The lion’s share of these qualities have to do with people—with the people you select, develop and manage; with the ways you motivate your employees and with the ways you work together, develop priorities and accomplish corporate goals.

The irony is that management typically focuses the bulk of its resources on other strategies. Finance, sales, marketing and investment strategies are usually thought of as the hard issue, so they are given much more prominence that the softer issue of human resource strategies. But better people strategies are needed to gain a meaningful, competitive edge.

Improving people strategies starts by renewing the way you look at your employees and their roles in the agency. Start by taking a fresh view of your managers and of employees you manage.

Along these lines, one of the questions we often pose at a convention is, “How many of you are managers?” To this, almost everybody immediately raises their hands. Then we ask, “How many of you have managers?” And, again, not quite as enthusiastically, everyone indicates they also have a manager. Then, as we discuss the differences between the way we manage and the way we are managed, an interesting point comes to the surface: Most of us know much more about the people who manage us than we know about the way we manage others.

When asked about the most annoying quality of those who manage you, most individuals respond that their managers often make them feel manipulated. There is an underlying, universally acknowledged feeling that managers often try to get others to do things through formulas and half-truths, which, in reality employees can see right through. Such tactics only undermine a collaborative, team-building approach to management. And yet, we often try to use these very same approaches with those we manage.

The lesson to take, in your role as a manager, is that you need to be more authentic and to better understand those you manage, including their strengths, motivations and limitations. Only then can you include them in your strategies and recognize how they can contribute, in very meaningful ways, to corporate goals.

Of course, not all of the individuals you manage will respond to one uniform approach. Everyone is an individual, so they will all respond differently. But, by better understanding the most effective way to get them from Point A to Point B—and by talking their language in a way that communicates to each of them directly—you will be able to tap into their commitment, gain increased buy-in to corporate goals and, in so doing, increase their overall productivity.

This means becoming better strategists of the individuals who make up your staff so you can really match your management approaches to the individual goals and the corporate objectives and culture. While it might be more difficult than the approach you are used to, the end result will be greater productivity, increased performance and improved quality.

Improving people strategies is the most direct way to improve service, reputation, consistency, enthusiasm, authenticity, reliability and availability—all of the quality issues that are top-of-mind concerns for managers today.

Herbert M. Greenberg, Ph.D., is president and CEO of Caliper.