Quality Is on Everyone's Mind

By Herbert M. Greenberg, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Caliper

Everyone is concerned with how to attain quality, how to keep it, and how to be known for it. This emphasis on “quality” is compelling. Quality is definitely seen as the factor that can distinguish your wholesale distribution business from your competitors.

In many ways, quality might seem elusive, or, at best, hard to measure. However, it is easy to determine when quality is present and when it is missing.

And we are all drawn to people, companies, products, and services that exude quality.
Whenever we speak about quality before a group of executives, among the questions asked is, “What characteristics make up a perception of a quality company?” The top-of-mind responses from executives include:

• Service


• Reputation


• Consistency


• Integrity


• Commitment


• Enthusiasm


• Authenticity


• Reliability


• Availability.

When you review this list, the lion’s share of these characteristics have to do with people — with the people we select, develop, and manage, with the ways in which we motivate our employees, with the ways we 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 issues.” So they are given much more prominence than the “softer issue” of human resources strategies. But the area surrounding better strategies for our people is precisely where we can gain a meaningful, competitive edge.

Improving our people strategies starts by renewing the way in which we look at our people and the jobs they fill. We can start by taking a fresh view of our managers and of those who we manage.

Along these lines, one of the questions we pose is, “How many of you are managers?” To this, almost everybody immediately raises his or her hand. Then we ask, “How many of you have managers?” And, again, not quite as enthusiastically, all indicate they have managers. Then, as we discuss the differences between the way we manage others 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.

And one of the most annoying qualities usually expressed about the people who manage us is that they often make us feel manipulated. There is an underlying, universally acknowledged feeling that our managers often try to get us to do things through a variety of formulas and half-truths, which, in reality, we can see right through, and which serve to undermine a collaborative, team-building approach to management. And yet, we often try to use these very same approaches with those who we manage.

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

About this Blog

This blog is created by NAW and its partner Caliper, an international management consulting firm that offers a wide range of personnel services to wholesale distribution companies.