Curiosity

To foster a culture of adaptability, engagement, and high performance on your team, you need to demonstrate consistent curiosity about your employees, yourself, and your organization. Here’s how:

Curiosity about employees. Organizations are a collection of the mindsets, attitudes, and values of the people that work within them. To shape your team’s culture, you need to understand people’s values and motivations. Talk to employees directly, formally survey them, or engage in focus groups about the team’s culture to tap into your collective wisdom.
Curiosity about yourself. As your culture evolves, you must too. Reflect with open-mindedness on your own role. Ask yourself: How have I evolved over time within this team and this organization? The better you understand your own position in the culture, the better suited you’ll be to lead and shape it.
Curiosity about the organization. Great leaders don’t just shape culture once—they stay curious about the changing nature of their companies and contexts over time. How have your organization’s mission, vision, and values changed? How has the personnel changed? And how have all of these factors affected the culture along the way? The more you understand your cultural context, the better equipped you’ll be to navigate it.
Curiosity about the domain: What are the changes in your field? What is current research? Regulatory shifts? Best practices? The more you understand the external landscape, the better equipped you are to establish a vision of excellence.

Happy little boy holding glass with soap foam by David Pereiras from Noun Project (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Structured unstructured time

First, what impacts knowledge workers’ energy is not the sheer amount of time they spend in meetings, but the relative proportion of meeting time compared to what they spend on individual tasks. We found that, on a given day, the more time knowledge workers dedicate to meetings relative to their own individual tasks, the less they engage in small break activities (e.g., a short walk, casual conversations, brief fun reading) to restore their energy during that day. The absence of such break activities, which are crucial for periodic replenishment, harms their workday energy. The impaired energy in turn has a negative impact on the knowledge workers’ task performance, creativity, and job satisfaction at work.
“Arrange Your Meeting Schedule to Boost Your Energy” by Chen Zhang, Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Zhaodong (Alan) Qiu (Harvard Business Review)

Solid research here that really resonates. Go and read it.

You, Yes You! Speak at a Conference

The process of writing and speaking is a core part of the Quality profession. Only through these activities can we truly contemplate and learn from our accomplishments to propel us forward to new heights.

There are some great speaking opportunities for folks around the Boston area coming up:

BOSCON is November 6 and 7th and is looking for speakers. I’m a huge fan of this regional convention and strongly recommend it. Submissions are due August 15th, 2023.

BOSCON 2023- Nov 6&7-Call for Speaker

The ASQ’s Quality Innovations Summit (formerly the Quality 4.0 Summit) is September 19–21 in Boston, MA with a theme of “Innovations and Future Trends for Excellence.” Submission deadline is June 9th, 2023, with more information here.

I’m quite happy to help coach potential new speakers, both in the development of your proposal and in your presentation.

Making Presentations Accessible

Quality Control as a Top 10 Skill

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has developed a Global Skills Taxonomy that provides a framework for aligning around a universal language for skills. It synthesizes and builds on existing taxonomies by integrating definitions and categorizations of skills that are of growing relevance in a fast-changing labor market ¹

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, quality control is one of the top 10 core skills listed in the Global Skills Taxonomy. In the WEF taxonomy, Quality control refers to the process of verifying that a product or service meets specified standards or requirements. It appears to bundle both quality control and quality assurance into this definition.

Quality Control was not listed in the top 10 in the 2020 report. Throughout you find reference to a skill set called “Quality control and safety awareness”, so we can assume this is a refinement in the reporting. In any case, this is an interesting development that I wish the WEF’s material provided more detail on, especially as the 2021 Skills Taxonomy doesn’t include an entry for Quality Control.

You need to go to the Data Explorer for Quality Control to see valuable information. Including this nice chart on the 7 top countries emphasizing quality control.

What facinates me most here is how it is not developing countries, there are some economic power houses here.

The industry categories of importance are interesting. Some industries I consider strong on quality rank below the mean and ohers above the mean. Others, Information and technology services I am looking at you, rate well below the mean on importance and it explains a lot of what is wrong with the world.

It would be nice to see the taxonomic entry. I’m fascinated by this one on Problem-Solving, which contains the first 2 in the top 10.

Interesting read that creates a lot of questions for me. But France and Canada, feel free to hit me up since it seems you are skill building.

And to help the WEF out, here is a nice way to break down what Quality is all about.

Making Presentations Accessible

Presentations are critical part of sharing and growing as a professional. I’ve gone on the record more than once stating that to truly grow you have to get as comfortable as possible presenting. But it is not merely enough to present, we need to strive for great presentations.

So coming out of WCQI a fw thoughts.

Our Slides are Mostly Awful

Powerpoint is your co-facilitator. Use it well. Do not use powerpoint as a wall of text. I actually hear a speaker this week say he put lots of text in a slide so folks can use them without hearing him speak. Oh no. Stop that.

Powerpoint Slides

Make the Presentations Accessible

During the Conference

Great advice here

Great advice in this post about acessibility, something we should always be standardizing.

I love the index card idea. I will be using it my next presentation.

Every Presentation is a Training

While we may not do level 3 or 4 assessments (or even formal level 2), take the attitude that each and every presentation is a training and strive for effectiveness in design.

Three things that get in the way of good training

Presentations are a Continuous Cycle of Improvement

No one was born as a good trainer. Get a coach. Ask for help. Realize that your first presentation will not be as good as your second and etc. Put the time in.

Look for Opportunities

You have done something that others are interested in. Take pride in it and share. There are always great opportunities, like BOSCON, so find them and put in a proposal. You may not get accepted, but as I said above, it is a cycle of improvement.

BOSCON 2023- Nov 6&7-Call for Speaker

If you are reading this, I am willing to help you on your presentation journey.