CoachBri’s Blog

Insight quality management gets its definition from the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and William Glasser. Deming, like Glasser, believed that quality can be achieved when people come to the realization that personal power associated with bossing gets in the way of people achieving quality.

One of my personal challenges in working with managers and employees alike is to persuade them to drive out fear and instill trust, confidence, compassion and kindness as tools that lead to quality. However, one of the least talked about things in business today is the process of insight. This is probably the single-most important factor and catalyst for change. In order for insight to flourish, the first factor is a process called questioning (or meditating or self-evaluation and it probably has many other names) but it directly deals with a transformation in the person’s consciousness. All human problems that prevent relationship are within humankind’s consciousness. This is where a change must take place in order to understand how to bring about and identify quality within an organization.

For many thousands of years humankind has been willing to shift technological thinking in order to solve our problems in technological matters. But when it comes to psychological matters and the problems of daily living, human beings, I believe, choose not to solve their problems because they are unwilling to shift theory and choose a new psychology. People who do shift technological theory are looked upon as pioneers in their field. People who shift psychological theory change the world for the better forever. The only way human beings are going to create an environment where work is looked upon as a place for inner transformation and growth is by self-evaluation. This means that whenever a person doesn’t feel good inside himself or herself they stop practicing the four premises of an external psychology. These four premises are: taking things personally, blaming other people, trying to get people to change, and knowing what’s best for others.

In all the interactions within an organization the first premise of internal psychology, reacting by taking information personally, must be totally set aside. Long term planning must replace short term reacting. This means that companies have to embrace insight quality management and develop a new system where leadership through compassion and accountability merge with consistency of purpose and continual improvement.

Managers need to begin to create a warm, safe, and caring environment for their employees. This can be achieved by getting to know your employees, and more importantly, letting them know you. Dr. Glasser recognizes the importance of getting close to the people that you work with and allowing them to get close to you so that the relationship is need fulfilling. Managers must teach employees what quality looks like. They can do this by identifying quality when they see it and make it visible. In this beginning phase managers must set aside all boss management (to use Glasser’s term) habits. These habits include punishing, rewarding, and telling people what to do how to do their work. But most important is allowing employees to evaluate their own work and coming up with ways that they can improve it. This is a huge change in the system of boss management. This is one of the most difficult things to understand because managers must work on the system and not on the employees. This is foreign to most boss managers because they lack in the insight into internal motivation, as described by Glasser.

Boss management has its origins from the dawn of man. When human beings began to give thinking priority, we slipped into an egocentric position and the narcissistic view of leadership. This is basically a philosophy of “do what I say because I say it”. This destroys compassion, accountability, and consistency of purpose because the only purpose that matters is the bosses’. In this situation, constant improvement goes out the window.

In order to bring about this change within an organization, a new philosophy needs to be adapted. This philosophy is based on the work of William Glasser, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Alan Watts and James Allen. All of these people have emphasized the importance of a relationship based on internal psychology but may have called it different things. All of these people created what they did through the process of insight, which is a movement outside the field of time. However, in order to practice these insights, time and patience is needed because it is about learning new behaviors that inevitably create greater effectiveness, success and happiness for the people using them.
One of the most important elements in creating an insight performance workforce is to help people understand that learning and internal psychology create meaning and purpose in their life.
This is no doubt a hard sell. What it means is convincing managers and employers that boss management is in fact getting in the way of producing quality products and services. If the organization is constantly focused on the idea of quality at the lowest possible cost it is almost impossible to capture or maintain its place in the market.

All organizations that are able to produce the highest quality at the lowest possible cost succeed. However, one must come to terms with a definition of quality. Deming and Glasser would agree that quality is anything that is consistent in satisfying one or more of a person’s basic needs. In the same way, organizations have needs and these basic needs are tied to the needs of the people within the organization. Therefore when people’s basic needs are satisfied within the workplace so are the needs of the organization. These basic needs, as defined by William Glasser, are as follows: survival, fun, freedom, power, and belonging. When we are born we have these drives and we need to satisfy them. The satisfaction of the survival need feels good. We also learn to have fun and to be free and that freedom creates some control in our life that allows us to make choices. We also develop our sense of power by gaining control and mastering our surroundings and learning to get what we want. We also learn that being loved feels good from the people that show us care and then, later on, we also learn to love, which also feels good. This is never more apparent than in the workplace: five people that really like each other will do the work of twenty-five people that don’t. This belief leads organizations to stop doing quality inspections and begin to practice producing quality in both products and service, as well as in all processes.

We all know that to work for a manager that is open and honest and has a deep sense of caring about the work they do enhances how we feel about them and the place where we work. It is crucial that an environment that is warm and supportive be cultivated if quality is to be achieved. The next important single factor is that the work is useful and meaningful to the person doing it. This helps create what Deming calls the consistency of purpose. The third most important element is teaching self-evaluation and constant improvement. The fourth requirement is that employees and managers are always asked to do their very best work. People will only give their very best when their needs are satisfied. This is why fear mongering creates distortions and removes the consistency and purposefulness of the organization. Fear mongering and boss management creates a “cover your ass” mentality, which gets in the way of the fifth requirement of quality. This quality focuses on feeling good in the job you’re doing and the way you do it. The purpose of human feeling is to tell us what our life is about and why what we’re doing isn’t very effective or isn’t satisfying our basic needs. This then leads to the sixth requirement: when working towards quality work is never destructive. This is hard for most people to understand because when there is an unsupported environment or someone else is evaluating your work, everything gets in the way because people are not quality minded.

Quality minded people are always focusing in the present and their level of effectiveness, looking towards a future achievement. They never take their eye off the prize and the prize to them therefore represents quality. This is a crucial part of producing quality because the focus goes on quality supplies as a means to achieve consistency. Cheaper suppliers do not offer the same consistency in materials, shipping, and services. In all of these situations, insight performance management seeks to train on the job to again produce people doing a better job, shifting away from just meeting the targets. Targets are another way of allowing fear to come in and, with that, the judgment of other workers. Focusing on processes and seeing them as the cause of error is much more efficient and effective in creating purpose. Deming always refers to treating departments as internal customers, stressing the need to get along. When workers have objectives to be achieved, not numerical targets, greater quality is obtained.

The shift to insight performance management employs the brains of people, not just their skills. In the production of quality, the relationship between the employer and the employee is the most important. It removes barriers that prevent people from getting along. It builds the foundation of self-improvement and education that lead to improvements in any part of the organization. We are all responsible for quality and productivity especially at the top. The way the top views the employees doing the work must become friendlier. Annual reviews are thrown out and replaced by strength and weakness sharing.

All of this is very new to the boss management style and also very frightening to the manager. The manager must stop working on the employees and learn to create new and better processes to help the system work more efficiently. There is little that can be done if we don’t see that the crisis is within our own consciousness. It is here and solving the problems that prevent relationship in our daily lives with the way we work with one another is the source of our unhappiness. In environments where people are unhappy, those unhappy people tended to evaluate other people and create further unhappiness. On the other hand, happy people or effective people almost always evaluate himself or herself when they are faced with a challenge. This is very difficult for boss managing people to understand or buy into. So many organizations let one or two individuals poison the environment for the many. These boss management minded-people are like cancers in the workplace. Very few are willing to give up bossing and start leading.

At Human Potential Plus we build people’s capacity to self-evaluate by training people on how to coach and lead without external control psychology. Many organizations that thrive are thriving because of the people within the organization. If you look at any effective department you will see effective people improving processes. But more importantly, you will see managers who like and enjoy the people they work with.

Coach bri