Saying that your company is for quality is not enough. How you put your systems in place to achieve quality is what matters. This was the conclusion of a recently held two-day workshop in Kathmandu on Leading for Quality. The event was led by two American experts Pat Townsend and Joan E. Gebhardt, and organised by Nepal's Network for Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness. Around 80 managers from the profit and non-profit sectors attended the program.

Townsend and Gebhardt explained the seven required elements - top management commitment, leadership, 100 percent involvement with a structure, communications, training, measurement, and employee recognition - of a complete quality process (CQP).

Up to a point, top management's commitment to quality is self-explanatory. But commitment here indicates both persistence and constant follow-ups to make sure that pursuit of quality in terms of products, services and customer satisfaction remains high on the agenda of senior managers. Most Nepali managers want quality through statistics and measurements without thinking about getting the internal culture right. They forget that machines do not produce anything by themselves. It's the people who must be persistently encouraged to work together to produce results.

Such persistence calls for both focus and the ability to let things go. Focus, because the goal to achieve quality is clear. Letting things go means taking a step back to authorise employees to make decisions at their levels. And that's another way of saying, "create mini-leaders throughout the organisation." It is these people-empowered to make mistakes and learn from them-who can help senior managers translate their drive for quality into tangible results.

With managers and employees on board, there needs to be a common structure on which they can perform. For instance, some employees may have ideas which are good, but not practical or in line with the organisation's larger goals. Others might have minor ideas that could make a small but important difference to customer satisfaction. A common structure allows all to discriminate between ideas that lead to quality, and ideas that are just good to have.

Townsend and Gebhardt stressed that senior managers spend much time leading internal communications via regular staff meetings, emails, and face-to-face conversations. In most Nepali organisations, it's the employees who have to rely on rumours and office cliques to find out what their own company is doing or not doing. Regular internal communications give the same information to all, thereby making everyone focus on quality and not at each other's positions in office politics.

Most Nepali companies are hesitant to send their staff on training programs because they fear that the staff might leave for higher pay elsewhere. In other words, ongoing training is seen as a way to reward long-term loyalty, not necessarily to enhance specific job-related skills and knowledge. But quality requires a stream of training programs related to measurements, feedbacks and learning from other companies that lead to better ways of doing the same processes and procedures.

Finally, a commitment to quality requires that employees are recognised and rewarded, and that their efforts are celebrated in some form throughout the organisation. Since most Nepali companies are family-run enterprises, celebrating non-family employees' good work does not happen easily. But as Townsend and Gebhardt pointed out, who wants to do quality work if no one appreciates the person or the team behind it?

The workshop was instructive in the sense that it showed that while \'hard' tools such as statistical analysis are necessary, it is the repeated application of \'soft' tools such as communication, appreciation and the like that create a real climate of quality in an organisation.