Introduction
How can leaders create a followership in a quality culture? Leadership for quality requires customer focus, an obsession with quality, teamwork, continuing education and training, and an emphasis on best practices and peak performance (Goetsch & Davis, p. 125). Those are end-results, however. How do we get there?
This post begins by examining the character traits of a good leader. Next, we describe a specific type of team and describe a leadership style that works for such teams. We then evaluate the different leadership styles described in Goetsch & Davis against that team. We find that only one style seems to work – and that style is rejected by aficionados of total quality management (TQM)! We conclude with a modification of this style that addresses the shortfall.
Leadership Characteristics
For a leader to lead, he must possess certain virtues that make him worth following. The leader must display self-confidence and have characteristics such as self-discipline, honesty, credibility, common sense, stamina, commitment, and steadfastness. (Goetsch & Davis, p. 128-129). These traits are a subset of the U.S. Marine Corp’s leadership traits captured by the acronym JJ DID TIE BUCKLE (justice, judgement, dependability, integrity, decisiveness, tact, initiative, endurance, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty, and enthusiasm) (Mangiameli, 2014).
A leader must act in a way that his followers will detect these traits and work with the leader in a win-win manner (Goetsch & Davis, p. 130) that ensures the customer receives quality products and services, and that quality is continually improved. This way of acting is called a leadership style.
A Particular Type of Team
The leadership style must be tailored to the individuals or team that must be led. Instead of considering which style works best to inspire a team to achieve a customer-centric and quality-focused environment, let us consider a team that is already centered on customer satisfaction and quality improvement and see how they react to various leadership styles.
Consider a team of extremely competent and aggressive software engineers. They are exceptionally productive workers, frequently sleeping under their desks, or bringing tents into the office, or working multiple 24-hour days. They have zero tolerance for bureaucracy or prevarication. Such software engineers have large egos of necessity. The best way to accommodate that factor is to keep team sizes as small as possible, and the responsibilities of the members within the teams should be non-overlapping.
Of any potential leader they would ask: “what qualifies you to be a leader?” From experience, the best type of leaders would be those who are/were software engineers. The leaders need not be top-notch engineers, but they must be good enough to be respectable.
This type of leader will be both well-grounded as well as have a long-term strategic outlook. They can communicate both short-term and long-term goals with their teams. Any explanation of “why” is either short or unnecessary – they all know why they are there. When communicating goals, the last thing a manager should do is to use the corporate-speak word “vision,” as the software engineers would suggest they adjust their medications!
This type of leader knows to set the direction and get out of the way - excellent software engineers are not led, they are unleashed.
All of this cannot be called a complete theory of leadership, but it is a rough outline of one. Does this leadership method fit into any of the leadership styles described in Goetsch & Davis?
Democratic and Participative Leadership Styles
Democratic leadership and participative leadership are similar in that both use group participation in decision-making with the goals of empowering employees and encouraging shared responsibility. Both use frequent public recognition to boost morale and encourage engagement. The main difference between them is where the decision-making authority lies.
In democratic leadership, also called consultative or consensus leadership, the leader makes the decisions only after receiving input and recommendations from team members. This can even be formalized by having the leader place multiple options up for vote and using majority rule.
With participative leadership, decision-making authority is shared more evenly across the team members. The leader may hold regular meetings to discuss ideas and build consensus through dialog.
From the standpoint of the high-performing software team, leaders using either participative or democratic leadership styles are seen as weak and feckless. Software team members would be concerned that individuals who do not have the proper technical knowledge or who aren’t “stakeholders” are somehow involved in the decision-making process.
Under democratic leadership, and to a lesser extent participative leadership, trust is very easily broken. This certainly will be the result when the leader gathers team member input after a decision has already been made. The high-performing software team will regard the efforts to elicit and provide input as wasted time, and any attempt by leaders to build consensus will be seen as really an effort to manufacture consent.
Finally, frequent public recognition for team members is seen as a “dog and pony show.” This is not to say that software should not be demonstrated; rather, software should be demonstrated to the relevant people on an as-needed basis, and without ceremony.
In summary, then, both participative and democratic leadership styles will be ineffective in leading teams of high-performing software engineers. Leaders will be seen as weak and indecisive, and trust can be easily broken. Further, confidence in the leader will be in doubt, as their ability to lead is based on things like consensus building instead of any actual talent.
Servant Leadership
Servant leadership is “a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations, and ultimately creates a more just and caring world.” (Greenleaf, 1970).
Servant leaders use “active listening” to make their team members “feel heard and valued, fostering a culture of open communication.” They are also committed to “healing” which means “[R]ecognizing the importance of emotional and mental well-being” so as to support “both themselves and their team in a way that nurtures a healthy, balanced work environment.” (IMD, 2024)
A common criticism of servant leadership is that leaders suffer from burnout because they ignore their own well-being. Another criticism is that it may clash with certain cultures (like the culture of a high-performing software team). For that, it may be better to determine which cultures with which it does not clash.
For the software team described above, servant leadership is in many ways worse than democratic or participative leadership styles. Servant leaders are not leaders at all, with their emphasis on empathy, active listening, relationships, and caring. High-performance software teams do not need to talk about their feelings over a pint of ice cream.
Further, servant leaders do nothing to earn the respect of the team of software engineers, and in fact they actively diminish respect. Weak leaders are seen as weak individuals, and that carries the baggage of falseness. In times of crisis, they are not paragons of strength, which is what is needed in those situations.
Goal-Oriented Leadership
According to Goetsch & Davis, goal-oriented leadership – also called results-based or objective-based leadership – has leaders focus solely on the goals at hand. “Only strategies that make a definite and measurable contribution to accomplishing organizational goals are discussed. The influence of personalities and other factors unrelated to the specific goals of the organization is minimized.” (Goetsch & Davis, p. 128)
Goetsch & Davis note that team members could be so focused on specific goals that they can overlook opportunities for improvement. For this reason, total quality workplaces should reject this leadership style.
Will goal-oriented leadership necessarily devolve like that? Companies that employ high-performance software teams frequently have “lab weeks” which gives them the opportunity to work on projects outside their usual domain. This leads to developing projects that represent new revenue streams or otherwise improve company operations.
Perhaps with this modification, goal-oriented leadership would be appropriate for the type of software team described here.
Conclusion
Building a following in a TQM environment necessarily involves finding a leadership style that maximizes employee engagement and challenges them to continually improve the quality of the goods and services that employees produce.
To do this, leaders should have some level of popularity among the team he leads, while maintaining a professional distance. Leaders must have a sense of purpose, and they must demonstrate traits such as self-discipline, honesty, credibility, common sense, stamina, commitment, and steadfastness. (Goetsch & Davis, p. 128).
The leadership styles presented in Goetsch & Davis allow most of these traits to be displayed by leaders – the major exception being credibility.
There doesn’t seem to be a single leadership style that covers every type of employee or team. Some people would flourish in one style, others – like the software team described here – would find that leaders are either not worth following or even that the leaders inhibit achieving a total quality workplace. An appropriate leadership style can maximize all the qualities of a total quality workplace, and an inappropriate style will cause quality standards to fall and result in team members leaving.
References
Goetsch, D. L. & Davis, S. B. (2021). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9th ed.). Pearson.
Greenleaf, R. (1970). The servant as leader. http://www.ediguys.net/Robert_K_Greenleaf_The_Servant_as_Leader.pdf
IMD. (2024). Understanding servant leadership and how to implement it in 9 steps. https://www.imd.org/blog/leadership/servant-leadership
Mangiameli, M. (2014, 21 October). How to apply Marine leadership traits to business. Task & Purpose. https://taskandpurpose.com/sponsored-content/14-marine-leadership-traits-apply-business/
