I often find myself in a meeting with a client’s leadership team, where someone asks me, “How can we build more of a Quality culture?” This simple question reveals significant information about how the company operates, as well as the state of its culture.

When this question is directed at me (and me alone), it can indicate the belief that building a quality culture is something to delegate to others or to make the responsibility of the Quality department alone. However, there is a better way to approach this task.

Alfred Lin, who spent years as the COO and Chairman of Zappos, uses a great analogy about developing a great culture, and it applies to building a great Voluntary QA (VQA) culture. He thinks it is important to make building a culture “a daily habit,” using the analogy of exercise and eating well – you must to do both every day. Taking a day off can lead to taking two or three days off – and then one day, you’re overweight and out of shape. You need to focus on your culture every day to improve. Key to this approach is specificity.

The more specific the elements chosen by a company’s leadership to focus on – coupled with actionable behaviors – the more likely they are to generate success and acceptance of a VQA culture. Here are examples I have seen work.

1. Make training a corporate goal.

Leaders have a profound effect when they say, “training is a corporate goal, and we want to train our entire workforce this calendar year.” This translates into tangible and measurable behaviors such specific metrics placed into performance reviews. Tying financial incentives to training goals also can move the needle.

Training is a fundamental way to start building a strong VQA culture because it allows you to inform people what is expected and how they are held accountable. (See posts about training as a foundation, the fundamentals, and how to bulletproof your training programs.)

2. Make company leadership visible and engaged in places they haven’t been/ seen before.

When was the last time the CEO was on the manufacturing floor asking questions and having people share with leadership what they are doing and how it works? MBWA (management by walking around) is a tactic that yield benefits because of the many informal, off-the-cuff conversations that can take place. When managers know that SVPs and CEOs care about what happens in the trenches, it has a positive impact.

A former junior colleague, who recently started a new job, noted how much she loved the company. Over lunch, she had had a conversation with the CEO that began with where she was going to graduate school, and it ended with her talking about what she thought was and wasn’t working at the company. That CEO was saying implicitly, “I hear you, and I want to hear from you, and I appreciate this level of detail.” Her experience was that leadership acknowledged her and cared about what she had to say.

3. Mandates must have actionable items.

Mandates given via email from the Quality department will have more impact if they include tangible, actionable items supported by upper management. Quality is everybody’s business not just the Quality department’s business … and employees don’t work for Quality departments. Involving company leadership in a collaborative manner can have a much more positive effect. It is leading by example and the idea of “Show, don’t tell,” which gets people engaged.

4. Foster an environment that inspires dialog and collaboration.

Install a whiteboard in a lab or on a manufacturing floor with posted questions such as “What does quality mean to you?” or “How do you view quality?’’ These become opportunities to discuss changes with people – how to fix or improve a process that seems convoluted, or gain feedback on perceived gaps – so people feel heard and recognize that their input matters.

For one company, we instituted a monthly meeting over tea and coffee with executives, so people had an opportunity to interact with the company leadership. We chose to implement this tactic when the company was experiencing massive growth and transition as it worked toward its inaugural drug approval. The talks allowed people to ask questions in unfiltered settings, which helped to build a sense of transparency and trust.

5. Be clear and specific on what to measure to show improved performance. And measure it.

A recent Pharmaceutical Manufacturing article, written by a trio of McKinsey & Company consultants, discusses how measuring specific behaviors is the best way to measure the effects of a quality culture.

The article notes how they “define a quality culture as one manifesting the following behaviors:

• Explicit prioritization of quality throughout the organization, including top-down communication and role modeling.
• Open and transparent discussion of quality issues throughout the organization, including bottom-up communication and engagement.
• Emphasis on truly resolving problems, finding the right root causes and addressing them to avoid future issues.
• Focus on prevention and building in quality, rather than on firefighting.
• Awareness of quality’s importance, empowerment to make quality decisions and take ownership of quality, and shared accountability.”

All of these behaviors I have found to be instrumental in bringing about a VQA culture. And when goals are specific and meaningful, measurement of these behaviors becomes easy and trackable over time.

It is important to start with the right questions when embarking on such an endeavor. For example, what does a quality culture look like to us (i.e., fewer batches rejected, full training of all staff, or a decrease in event investigations?) What are we willing to do to get there? How do we show we are committed to this endeavor on a daily basis? And how can we reward those who embrace the new endeavor?

Getting leadership to focus on such initiatives can be challenging, but when it happens, there are multiple benefits beyond forming a VQA culture. People feel empowered and can take on a new level of ownership and accountability. And the company becomes a better place to work.

The McKinsey article ends with a quote from Henry Ford about how quality is “doing the right thing when no one is looking.” I would add another from the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”