The White Falcon - 11.06.1993, Page 2

from the top
Total Quality in the military
By Lt. Col. Lynn Wills
Commander, 932ND ACS
I’m not sure when I became such a skeptic.
I think it was when my father-in-law tried to
convince me I could become an overnight
millionaire by investing in his idea to create
a cheap energy (heat) via the burning of a
new, highly efficient source (avocado seeds).
Skeptic or not, it doesn’t take a rocket scien-
tist to recognize our military is facing tre-
mendous challenges. It’s not so much budget
crunches and a declining force structure -
experience. Since we have no skills in the TQ
leadership style, we perceive that our author-
ity would be threatened.
• Building competency, knowledge, and
experience in an unknown subject takes time,
and we constantly face time crunches. Pro-
viding accurate, timely, and tactically sound
command and control is a full-time job. To
pause in order to train, study, plan and lead a
squadron through a cultural revolution seems
self defeating.
Another pitfall in adopting TQ comes im-
mediately after the initial commitment: the
We started out like gangbusters but then
momentum.
we’re smart enough to overcome those. Even
though we achieved the Gulf War victory, we
can’t rely on current technologies, including
leadership styles, to maintain our dominance
in military power. That’s why I’m excited
about our joint venture into a concept coined
by Feigenbaum in 1956 as “total quality
control,” or simply, Total Quality (TQ). But
changing leadership style is not without its
pitfalls.
Everything I’ve ever read or heard about
TQ starts off the same: TQ must be embraced
by leadership, and it must be top-down di-
rected. Conversely, failure of leadership to
buy-in dooms the TQ effort, and there are
several good reasons why leaders will fail to
commit totally:
•There is natural resistance to change.
Our squadron’s key leadership has accumu-
lated almost 75 years of service experience.
It is easy to continue those styles but difficult
to risk change.
• Risking change threatens the status quo.
The moral authority for our leadership is
based on our competency, knowledge, and
failure of leadership to lead. Following the
proper steps to introduce and then institution-
alize TQ throughout an organization offers
many opportunities for leaders to fail.
• Ready...fire...alm. Following a methodi-
cal, timely checklist was and still is extremely
difficult for leaders. We are impatient, re-
sult-oriented, and aggressive. We are prime
candidates for what Col. Cross, the 35th
Wing Vice Commander, terms “disease of
immediacy.”
Leaders who rush out looking for immedi-
ate results before laying the proper ground-
work for change will either spend consider-
able time “reworking” the implementation
steps or set themselves up for failure.
• TQ ain’t easy to understand or imple-
ment It’s not just “treating everyone like
you want to be treated.” It’s statistical proc-
ess control. Most of us have been to church,
but few of us have degrees in analysis. It
takes more than a three day familiarization
course to understand and use TQ principles.
Despite lengthy TQ implementation, we
made a conscious decision to lose manpower
slots for training purposes. We have
extremely adept quality advisors to teach
lead us through the implementation proc
We’re all reading books. We actually talk
TQ at the dining room and in the hallways.
The NATO base’s joint quality Resource
Center has also been very helpful. We’re not
moving as fast as we want, but we can’t
afford NOT to spend the time on TQ.
An additional pitfall to implementing TQ
is the failure of leadership to sustain efforts
once started and to slip back into the old
ways of doing business. You may argue that
people who truly buy-in never “blackslide.”
I think some regression is normal. But lead-
ership must sustain the TQ effort.
• We are all creatures of habit We simply
tend to slip back into the old, comfortable
mold out of sheer habit.
• We started out like gangbusters but then
lost momentum. After building a vision and
mission statement and finalizing a strategic
plan, we fell victim to stomping out everyday
fires. We lost sight of fixing processes.
None of these challenges stands alone, we
made terrific progress but mentally took a
break. Problems arose, and we reacted as
had been trained for so many years. AH
bandaged the problem rather than examiiS
processes.
How can we overcome these challenges?
We must continuously renew the commit-
ment to adopt a TQ leadership style. Consci-
entiously look for opportunities to attack
and solve problems differently.
There are a lot of reasons for not risking the
change to the TQ style of leadership. There
are plenty of pitfalls once the decision to risk
the change has been made. The benefits of
adopting TQ outweigh the risks, and our
commitment will see us through the chal-
lenges of implementation. Total Quality will
be with us for a long time to come.
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