#QUALITYtweet - An Interview with Tanmay Vora (Part II)

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I’m devoting this week’s articles to author and blogger Tanmay Vora’s recent book, #QUALITYtweet. I reviewed the book in a previous article. Today’s article is part two of this two-part interview with Tanmay. The first part of this interview can be found here.

My experience is that most folks think of project management and quality management as very “hard skill” focused; things are either done or they aren’t. Most of your writing, both in the book and on your blog, seems to focus on the more “soft skills” of leadership. Why do you think it is so important for project and QA managers to pay attention to the soft skills of leadership?

When project and QA managers look for dispassionate compliance to processes from the team members, the binary status (either it’s done or it’s not) may probably hold true. But the moot question is “Does dispassionate conformance to process produce quality?” The answer most of the times is a resounding ‘No’.

Strategic leadership, commitment to quality from top, leadership behavior to form a quality centric culture, ability to motivate people, empower them, engage them to foster creativity and innovation is as important as processes and models.

The “human” factor of modern day service delivery makes leadership and “soft” aspects of work even more important. Empowerment, Empathy and Education are three most important “E’s” to achieve right culture.

Here are a few tweets from my book that address the “leadership” aspect of building a quality culture:

“How NOT to deliver total quality: focus on quality of product without focusing on quality of relationship and communication.”

“People work for a leader who works for their people.”

“QUALITY = HARD + SOFT.

Hard = data, statistics, and information.

Soft = human attitudes, beliefs, and motivations.”

Everywhere we look we find examples of poor, or at best average, quality in products and services. Do you think this is a failure of leadership or something else?

I think that average or poor quality stems from a number of things. The most prominent is lack of innovation. The product that is available as a commodity elsewhere is a mediocre product, in spite of being defect free. Products need to raise the bar and set new standards in “utility” and “innovation” else they are considered average. Lack of leadership vision, right organization culture, poor execution and resistance to changing market demands are some of the most prominent reasons for average/mediocre products.

Tanmay Vora heads Quality Assurance & Testing at Gateway Technolabs  based in Ahmedabad, India. He speaks and consults on software quality assurance and publishes the QAspire Blog where he writes about quality and leadership issues.

You also might be interested in:

1. #QUALITYtweet – An Interview with Tanmay Vora
2. #QUALITYtweet – A Book Review
3. Intersection of Reflection Leadership and #QUALITY
4. Just Ask Leadership – An Interview with Gary B. Cohen
5. Just Ask Leadership – An Interview with Gary B. Cohen (Part II)