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FROM MANAGER TO LEADER
The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to improve output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort (Deming. Out of the Crisis: 248).
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- Understand the following 4 components of Profound Knowledge
 Appreciation for a system
- a system is a collection of processes and relationships (see examples below)
- in order to optimize a system, you must understand how its
components work together
- what are the boundaries of your system?
- workers are saddled by a system created by management
EXAMPLES
- Family - Relationship between children and their parents' behaviors
- Academic department - Realtionship between recruiting practices and tenure decisions
- Work - Relationship between being nice to employees and their performance
- Society - Relationship between your own driving habits and other drivers' behaviors
- Global - Relationship between wars, oil prices, unemployment in Alberta
- TQM - Can we
implement successfully TQM in our society? Can we do away with
the grading system in education? Can we do away with a personal
review system at work?
Knowledge
of variation
- common vs. special causes of variation
- improvement vs. tampering (making harmful changes in response to chance events that likely afflict any stable system)
- you can improve a process only if it is stable, that is under statistical control
Theory of knowledge
- many important (long-term) things cannot be measured and are unknown (see examples nelow)
- the method used to collect data (survey, interview, phone,
non-scientific magazines, gossip) is critical for correct
interpretation of the data
- experience teaches us nothing; on their own, data have no
meaning. This statement emphasizes the need to interpret and
apply information against a theory. Apparently,
according to Deming, experience is NOT the best teacher. On its own, experience is just
raw data that can be misinterpreted against a flawed theory. Knowledge comes from theory.
Without theory, there is no way to use information that comes to us on
the instant. Without theory, one has no questions to ask.
Hence without theory, there is no learning.
- understand the differences between grounded beliefs and opinions.
EXAMPLES
- Long-term effects of treating poorly one customer
- Long-term effects of mistreating your children
- Asking people for feedback in a face-to-face session
- Reading
student teaching evaluations without giving due consideration to the
nature of the class and instructor characteristics
- Ranking/rewarding/punishing people who operate in a stable system on the basis of a one-off event
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Providing positive information to someone who cannot deal with negative
information
- A very high approval rate in an election
Psychology
- people are different
- people may have difficulties to separate egos from issues
- workers often try to fit ambiguous information (management decisions)
into their pre-existing understandings and fears. Consequently,
workers operate out of their own understandings of the likely sequence of
events once management decisions are implemented.
- fear triggers survival instincts
- fear encourages workers to manipulate processes to meet targets, and information
- fear pushes people to focus on results (bottom line) rather than process
- people want to contribute and excel
- people are status-oriented
- people like to be acknowledged
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