When you lead a quality assurance team, you spearhead a group that makes key decisions to maximize productivity, efficiency and profitability without sacrificing product integrity or safety.
How can you inspire your QA team to greatness?
Optimize Your Processes
Utilize quality management system techniques including mapping, benchmarking and cost-benefit analysis to achieve ongoing improvement in work flow and bring out the best in your team members. When it comes to your processes:
- Analyze them. Focus on the tasks, not on individual personalities. Standardize policies and procedures company wide. Thoroughly train every individual so they can achieve high-quality outcomes and take pride in their work.
- Align them with those of others in your industry. Turn to the American Productivity and Quality Center and other resources for helpful tools.
- Develop performance measurements. Benchmark your current processes and identify any problems. Predict future outcomes. Measure productivity gains using key performance indicators for your industry.
- Build in quality testing. Perform testing on an iterative basis, not only at the end of a process when it will be more costly to take corrective action. Resolve issues as you encounter them. Implement automated testing if possible.
- Use business strategies like Six Sigma. Have teams create projects that define a problem, measure the current process, and gather and analyze data to validate cause-and-effect relations. This leads to determining the root causes of issues and designing the right interventions. It enables a team to control production so defects are corrected early on, before they impact your final product.
- Value stakeholder feedback. Use input from employees, customers, suppliers and business partners and measure quality gains via increases in their satisfaction ratings. By leveraging customer requirements in your process redesign efforts, you can accurately focus on the most lucrative areas of business. Conduct surveys and focus groups to gather information. Prepare and distribute reports summarizing findings.
Communicate Clearly
Set clear expectations about how your team should communicate. These should cover everyday communications as well as periodic status updates.
- Use multiple methods to communicate your goals and objectives. Tools may include staff meetings; one-on-ones, which are key for introspective goal setting, and brainstorming and problem-solving sessions. Consider the style of each individual. Some will need to talk it through. Others will simply take in information before responding. Not everyone will be vocal immediately, so accept suggestions, ideas and solutions after meetings as well.
- Be flexible. Stay focused, but be willing to adapt. Prioritize goals to help team members know when it’s okay to shift their attention to another project, but have a defined deadline to keep everyone on track. Should your goals be changed to reflect new information? Rely on team members who welcome change to lead this charge. Create platforms to amplify their voices.
Tear Down Barriers
It’s not only your job to get out of your team’s way, but also to remove other obstacles that stand between them and success. This means eliminating unnecessary meetings, leading by example, providing needed resources, and last but not least, allowing team members to make decisions. They shouldn’t have to come to you with every single issue. Trust them – or take them off the team.
To learn more about effective team leadership, read our related posts or contact the workforce development experts at Premium Staffing, Inc. today.