Are high quality standards an outdated concept?
The author questions and redefines the traditional concept of “quality standards,” explaining how consistent entrepreneurial actions increase your employees’ commitment to quality and motivates them to fulfill and increase quality standards.
Remember when you were driven by that burning, intrinsic motivation – so driven that you would spend hours upon hours polishing your passion project to perfection? At what point did it hit you that this type of very high quality standard had become impractical? What did that realization change for you and what conclusions did you draw, both personally and for your business? And, most importantly: once lowered, how can quality standards in modern businesses be raised again? Is it possible at all? That is the central issue of this article.
What is “quality”, anyhow? How does poor quality come about? And do DIN standards suffice to define the essence of quality, to evaluate and increase quality performance? The following questions lead to the core of this matter:
- What can you do when your own standards are never met because colleagues and/or customers expect and are satisfied with significantly less?
- Is it economically sound to do more than what is absolutely necessary?
- Isn’t dissatisfaction a natural result of our own high expectations?
And doesn’t all this mean that in the end it’s the less-than-brilliant, the average, the ones who don’t scrutinize their own performance who are happiest? Definitely not. The world needs people with high standards, people who are driven by their projects and their need for perfection. Each business thrives on intrinsic motivation, the voluntary drive to perform. This is why high quality requires the right entrepreneurial actions. They transform individual quality standards into a collective value that benefits everyone.
_
This is a management summary of an article first published in the magazine of Digital Tempus Germany. You can read the full article here in German, or contact me if you wish to have more information about the topic.
