Chapter 8
Managing Diversity and Total Quality: An Integrated Strategy for Organizational Renewal
In an increasingly competitive environment, many of America’s corporations are engaged in a variety of efforts to renew their enterprises: visioning, thinking strategically, building and changing corporate culture, downsizing, and, most recently, total quality—an initiative that emphasizes the importance of participatory decision making and high-performance work teams. Managing diversity now explicitly joins the list, although it has always been implicitly a part of the renewal effort. Much of what executives are now doing in their search for enhanced viability implicitly requires a managing diversity capability.
The point to remember is that these various approaches are related, and that one paves the way for the others. This is especially true when we look at managing diversity in relation to total quality. Together, they constitute an integral strategy for renewal.
What Is Total Quality?
Total quality is one of the most promising new ideas in the continuing efforts to maximize employee productivity and restore American competitiveness. Most managers would agree that it can be traced to Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s work with Japanese industrialists over a period of some thirty years.1 They disagree on exactly what it involves.
Some managers see total quality as a collection of techniques: quality circles, just-in-time inventory control, employee suggestion systems, participatory management, and continuous improvement. Others see it as a collection of principles: managerial commitment and involvement, dedication to customers, employee involvement, and improved processes.2
A broader view holds that total quality is a comprehensive approach calling for a change in the very fabric of the American corporation. Managers who hold this perspective contend that total quality represents, at heart, a cultural change. That means it takes more than trying out some techniques or adopting a set of principles. It demands modifying the fundamental assumptions that control U.S. businesses.
This broader view has been well described by Andrea Gabor:
While many companies have come to understand that they must conduct their businesses differently, few have grasped the enormity of the task that faces them. Some companies adopt SPC [statistical process control] in their manufacturing operations only to discover that marketing and sales have been left out of the improvement loop. . . . Yet other companies spend millions retraining their workers, but neglect to educate managers about their new role in the process. Quality management, Deming style, is a holistic philosophy that must be adopted in its entirety if it is to work at all.3
American Managers Experience Total Quality
Typically, managers’ perspectives on total quality evolve over time as their experience with it grows. First they are fascinated and preoccupied with the mechanics. It takes a while before they recognize that what they are doing is really a cultural or “fabric” change—far beyond the mechanics. A quality manager described his company’s progression:
We were busy with the mechanics of quality. At this point, we were doing the business and quality. There was no integration. We were getting results by doing quality and then going to manage the business.
We needed quality goals that led to business success, and business goals that led to quality success. We needed to integrate business and quality.4
Impressive results can be achieved during the mechanical stage, as various “success” stories have shown. Yet successes achieved during this stage can prove to be elusive, or extremely difficult to sustain.
Managers faced with this reality have several choices:
- Recommit to the same or additional total quality techniques.
- Adjust their aspirations downward.
- Reject total quality as unworkable.
- Expand their understanding of the concept of quality.
Managers who recommit must first rethink their resolve. After reexamining their rationale for moving forward and finding it adequate, they turn to the specifics of the task. “Why,” they ask, “aren’t we getting the desired results? What are we doing wrong?” Typically, they refine their implementation strategies.
Managers who are less enthusiastic may adjust their aspirations downward. These managers aren’t ready to discount quality, but they believe they’ve achieved what is reasonable, given their company’s characteristics and the nature of the effort. So they adopt a piecemeal approach. Some, for example, eliminate the name but keep part of the concept. In this context, some use task forces that operate sporadically to solve specific problems (usually posed by management). Other companies create all-encompassing employee involvement programs characterized by mandatory participation. Only a few retain the comprehensive notion of total quality as popularized in Japan.
Reasons for rejection of total quality range from ineffective management to perceived cultural incompatibility. One quality circle pioneer, for example, failed to weave the motivation for and commitment to the circles into its fabric. The result: the circles were abandoned after the departure of one of its first quality leaders.5 Other companies have discontinued quality techniques after deciding that they are not compatible with American culture. Success with the techniques, they believe, requires such “Japanese” practices as minimizing the differences in how managers and workers are treated, and fostering job longevity. “That’s all well and good for the Japanese,” they say, “but Americans just don’t think that way.”
Managers who have been most successful with total quality are those who, after reexamining their successes, have decided to broaden the concept. Total quality becomes for them not a technique but a comprehensive management philosophy. These managers take a leadership role. They become change agents, not just advocates of a program.
Remaining Challenges
Some of these managers, however, have discovered that even this is not enough. Total quality’s effects remain beneficial, but the benefits begin to plateau as the amount of energy needed to maintain a given level of progress increases. This reality is typical of managerial efforts that don’t incorporate consideration of the corporation’s core assumptions. It represents the Achilles heel of total quality. Even winners of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Prize, for example, haven’t achieved holistic total quality. Contenders are judged, instead, on progress with individual quality techniques, and on the intensity and extent of their efforts toward comprehensive implementation. Little, if any, attention is given to whether root cultural assumptions have been unearthed and made congruent with total quality.
This, of course, explains the difficulty in providing “proof” of the link between performance and total quality. Certainly, a business case can be made for progress with selected total quality techniques. But belief that adopting a holistic approach to total quality will pay off still requires leaps of vision and logic, since no company has achieved this level of implementation.
That doesn’t mean that the case is implicitly weak. But doer managers with tunnel vision and short-term time frames often have trouble relating to arguments based on vision and logic.
Even managers with broad vision and open minds are concerned about the difficulty of changing core corporate assumptions (roots). They are increasingly eager to explore ways total quality can be integrated with other change-oriented initiatives. And that brings us to managing diversity.
Integrating Total Quality and Managing Diversity
Individually, both total quality and managing diversity offer potential for enhancing corporate competitiveness, and both face challenges that inhibit their implementation. When the two are used in combination, the challenges are better managed and the benefits are increased—synergy at its best.
Total quality and managing diversity are similar in perspective and in intent. But they are not equally well understood. Practitioners may argue about the scope of total quality, but they generally agree on what it is. Not so with managing diversity. Many not only fail to differentiate among affirmative action, valuing differences, and managing diversity; they use such terms as “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and “pluralism” with imprecision as well. The result is conceptual confusion. Total quality’s skills and techniques are also more advanced than those of managing diversity. Yet their commonalities are more significant.
■ Both efforts are grounded in business rationales. Managers who become excited about total quality and managing diversity are motivated by competitive realities. Corning, Inc.’s experience is an example. In the early 1980s, this company, faced with aggressive competition, reduced profits, and an assertive work force, decided to adopt a total quality initiative. The Corning Quality Management System was developed and a Quality Institute established. Over the years, this participatory effort has shifted in focus but remains true to its goals. Corning managers are excited about the results and have made substantial progress.6
Managers serious about implementing managing diversity are attracted by the same kind of reasoning. They see managing diversity as a strategy for competitiveness. Jim Preston, CEO of Avon Products, says:
Some people say that by 1995, three out of four people coming into the workplace will be women or minorities. That is a fact. Well, if you are going to attract the best of those people into your organization, you’d better have a culture; you’d better have an environment in which those people feel they can prosper and flourish. If you don’t they will go elsewhere and you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage.
This is not some type of benevolent activity on our part. There is self-interest here. We have to have a culture and environment in which these people can flourish, and that’s what we are working toward.7
■ Both total quality and managing diversity stress empowerment or involvement of employees. Total quality requires that people be fully involved and committed; managing diversity calls for the empowerment of people who are diverse. This means that managing diversity is a prerequisite for full implementation of total quality. In an increasingly diverse work force, total quality’s emphasis on empowering people translates into our definition of managing diversity-empowering people who are diverse.
Progressive organizations are beginning to acknowledge this interrelationship. Their managers realize that if total quality is a priority item, managing diversity is also. If total quality is strategic and competitive, managing diversity is too, since total quality requires managing diversity capability.
■ Both total quality and managing diversity represent “way of life” changes. Implementation requirements for both options are so broad and deep that they require fundamental changes in the way corporations do business. Deming comments on the magnitude of the challenge:
Even when the management of a company embarks in earnest on the fourteen points for quality, production, and competitive position, advancement will at best appear to be sluggish. One must allow five years for the purchasing department to learn their new job. . . .
Companies with good management will require five years to remove the barriers that make it impossible for the worker to take pride in his work. Many companies will require ten years. . . .
It may be obvious to anyone . . . that a long thorny road lies ahead in American Industry—ten to thirty years . . .8
■ Both require cultural changes for full implementation. Established corporations are highly unlikely to be able to implement either managing diversity or total quality fully without cultural root change. It isn’t that they can’t secure behavioral change; this can be done by decree, if necessary. The problem is that if behavioral changes are incongruent with the corporation’s roots (culture), they will be short-lived—a painful reality for managers familiar with the start-and-stop process of major change initiatives.
Sustainable, long-term natural behavioral change requires congruence with the organization’s roots. If the culture does not support the desired behavioral change, the culture must be modified. Managers who drive behavioral change on the assumption that the roots will follow are doomed to repeat the cycle. When they relax their efforts they find the oak root saying to the grafted peach limb, “This is still an oak tree.”
■ Both total quality and managing diversity require long-term, pioneering change. Most managers have little experience with the false starts, ups and downs, ambiguities, uncertainties, and ambivalences that characterize such change. And most of them are uncomfortable with pioneering. That’s why they ask this tell-tale question: “Can you tell us about the successes of other companies with managing diversity?”
When managing diversity is integrated with total quality, the most significant implementation challenges that remain with total quality are more successfully addressed. This integration also addresses another important issue: manager overload and the fragmentation that can occur as a result of too many unrelated initiatives. Any new and complex approach takes time and effort. Implementing managing diversity within the context of total quality gives managers and employees a sense of continuity and unified purpose.
Such integration is, however, more successful if the two thrusts are seen as connected but separate. This is particularly true when a relatively well-established initiative such as total quality is paired with a more recent one such as managing diversity.
As American businesses struggle with their overall renewal agenda, appropriate integration between total quality and managing diversity can make the difference between success and failure.