The One Passion That Every Quality Manager Needs

My colleague’s call created both pride and stress at the same moment.  Pride because he had asked me to take an assignment, but also stress because I was to work with him closely for the next few weeks and to coach him in his new role as a quality manager.

Jim (a pseudonym) had gotten a promotion from a quality specialist to a manager role.  I was to come on site and mentor him in his new job, which I did.  I wonder who learned more, though.  Yes, I helped him with a few nuances of the job.  But along the way I learned something profound about the one essential characteristic that no business can run without.

Jim and I were huddling deep in a validation protocol when the production engineer, Chuck (also a pseudonym), came in to announce that they had fixed the problem that had caused a non-conformance on the previous batch.  Chuck wanted Jim to sign off on the non-conformance report so that the next batches could be released for sales.

I hovered in the background as Jim and Chuck sparred.  Jim asked, “How do you know that the problem has been solved?”

“We fixed the temperature probe,” said Chuck.

“I know that.  But how do we know that’s what caused the problem?”

“Because the next batch was fine!”

“Could be coincidence,” said Jim.  “Correlation does not mean causation.  Why would a bad temperature probe cause the non-conformance that we observed?”

From my fly-on-the-wall perch I busied myself on my laptop while peeking at the expressions flying across Chuck’s face.  “Uh.  Well…what?”

“Why did this non-conformance happen?  We need to figure this out, otherwise it’ll happen again and we’ll flush even more money down the drain.”

Slowly, rusty gears inside Chuck’s head began to turn.  Gears that had probably lain dormant since he was a child asking his parents why the sky was blue.  “But how can we figure that out?”

“We need to understand our process,” said Jim.  “We need to find the connection between the non-conformance and our assigned cause.  Let’s get our technical experts in here.  It’s the only responsible thing we can do with the company’s money.”

Chuck exhaled and then the two of them got to work.

Back in my office the next week I looked up from my computer screen.  “What happened last week?” I thought.  “I think I just saw the core of what a quality manager needs to be.  And not just a quality manager, every business needs to have somebody who stands their ground and insists on knowing why things just went wrong.”

If you don’t have that voice in the business, the pressure to push on and get product out the door will bury any efforts to improve the fundamentals of the business.  The quality manager has to be the backstop.

How about you?  Do you have a similar story?  What has worked best for you?  Comment below.