If a real culture of quality is one in which the individuals truly care about the quality of their work then it is important for the individuals to actually care. The organization cannot care more about quality than the individuals that make up the organization.
Before you sit back and wait for your organization to adopt a quality culture … look to what you can do on your own!
Last time we looked at a quality culture from the point-of-view of the organization; today we’ll focus on the individual – that would be you … and me.We work with a software system the production version of which was delivered with 2 different UI/UX standards. It is jarring. How could any self-respecting software company release such a thing? There are also buttons that when clicked, result in an error pop-up … even the most rudimentary testing would have shown these problems.
A culture of “it’s good enough” is hard to fight at the individual level. Quickly and carelessly “hacking” code and being rewarded for it because one is getting a lot done quickly creates an environment – a culture – where quality is not valued.
A culture is a social phenomenon requiring group interactions for its expression. The individual either replicates and reinforces the cultural norms or alters and modifies them. Here are three ways that you can participate in those group interactions:
- Habit – formed in response to a long process of learning and adopting social norms
- Imitation – where your behaviors copy those of the people around you, like a group walking together that adopts a common gait (have you ever walked “with” somebody who is oblivious to this?)
- Calculated risk – the power to either strengthen or change cultural norms resides at the individual level, for it is this level where control over the cultural phenomenon resides to the extent that it can be controlled at all.
Digging deeper … what role does quality play in your personal life? Do you demand better from yourself even in – or especially in – your recreational activities? It is not (just) competitiveness, although, for me, there is that … It is a drive for improvement … a willingness to work on improving. If you believe that you deserve “better” then you are also obliged to be – or become – better … or work toward that.
So, perhaps you can take a calculated risk and ask the question: “How can we release this software to our customers when it so obviously ‘draws hard vacuum’?” Well, our release schedule says this has to go out this month. Why is the schedule more important than the quality of the product? Because marketing has promised a new release every quarter. But why would releasing a defective product fulfill that promise? Because …
You see what I did there? As an individual, you can bring the 5 whys to bear on high leverage situations. What if you don’t want to risk raising the quality culture of your organization? Well, why would you want to work in a job where you don’t care about the quality culture of the organization?