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You see, the key point to me about managing quality is the need to understand what the customer of the product or service “sees” as quality. If you provide more than the customer wants or appreciates, you run the risk of higher than necessary costs and certainly lower margins. (There is less perceived value in what you offer than you think). If you provide less than the customer wants, they do not buy and there is no margin, only costs.
Lunch at McDonalds may be a better quality meal to a busy mother looking for a quick bite to eat where her children can get a toy and play on the climbing apparatus during her lunch break. For me, an evening at my son’s restaurant is my definition of a quality meal, but I’m looking at quality differently. You may even say there’s no better quality than Ruth’s Chris Steaks or The Cotton Club. In any event, you see the challenge of defining quality in a “mass” way. You can’t.
So, like a manufacturer or a service provider must identify their target customer’s needs and wants to design their quality offering, a hiring manager must identify what need is being met by hiring this new employee? If your answer is merely to replace a departing employee, then any warm body will do. And trust me, I’ve known a few hiring managers who thought they were happy just to find a warm body that could “fog a mirror”. That “happy glow” of finding a replacement didn’t last very long.
No, you need more than reviewing and updating the “job description” to give to your Human Resources Department with your position request.
You want to take a scan of the market; the mission of your team; the resources (technology, budget, existing people, facilities, etc.); the challenges you are currently experiencing meeting your objectives; your own capabilities of managing, mentoring, developing; your own future career prospects and aspirations; and on and on.
The idea is that all of these things have changed since your last employee was hired whether you recognize it or not. Markets change. Customers’ requirements change. Your competitions’ capabilities have changed. Your existing employees’ capabilities have changed. Your boss is stressing new opportunities and with fewer resources than you had before.
Even your personal ambitions or aspirations are likely to have changed because of all of these changes and others outside of your professional realm.
When you have a position opening, you have a tremendous opportunity to look at building a high performing, more collaborative, flexible, versatile, ‘colorful’, capable, responsive team for the future. (At this point, you can use any adjective you prefer to describe a more successful team that you would prefer to manage. The point is that with every opening or approved FTE from HR, you have an incredible opportunity to mold, to shape, to create, to build your ideal work group. But you have got to have some vision of what you are looking for in your future team.) It’s a wonderful chance to address your department’s shortcomings, challenges and dreams of greatness. Heck, it is a perfect time to demonstrate to your boss your capabilities of creating an organization that is operating at full capacity (and probably more so than your nearest competitor colleague for that upcoming promotion).
This is a perfect time to take stock of your capability needs today compared to what they were just a short six months ago if not a few years ago.
We’ve developed a marvelous tool that takes the classic job description and builds it for the 21st Century. It traces its roots to The Balanced Scorecard or Dashboard concepts from a few years ago.
Contact us if you would like to receive a sample.
