From Quality To Excellence
As 135 diverse companies from the 32 counties in Ireland gathered to accompany EIQA, the proud guardians of the Q Mark, in recognising excellence and celebrating success at The National Q Mark Awards, I remembered an experiment that I had been told about many, many years ago.
The experiment was said to have taken place sometime during the eighteenth century by a well-known botanist. The botanist weighed some soil before putting it into a rather large clay pot. Next, he weighed the sapling and then recorded both weights. Five years later, he returned to weigh the tree and was delighted that the tree’s weight had increased by almost 200lbs. But when he weighed the soil, he was amazed to discover that it had diminished in weight by only thirteen ounces.
The botanist gave much thought to this. Where did the tree’s extra 200lb come from, if not the soil? The answer of course is out of thin air.
But it wasn’t just thin air, it was the environment in which the sapling was nourished to allow the miracle process of photosynthesis; the breaking down, releasing and recombining of essential elements from one structure to another. The growth and development of the tree is the result of this remarkable transformation process.
Watching and listening to the excitement and comradery of those companies present at The National Q Mark Awards, I was struck with the thought that the growth and development of the companies was as a direct result of the environment in which the companies develop. Management or leadership is just like the soil in the botanist’s experiment. It is the environment that nourishes the plant. Good leadership makes it possible for the processes of growth and transformation to take place. Leadership is about providing the context supporting the process. Great leaders develop a sense of ‘chemistry’ with their teams, with the ‘plant’, with the resources and with the surroundings…it was that chemistry that filled the air in the ballroom.
It doesn’t matter what we do, how we do it or how well we create a product or service. We don’t succeed without the right people on our teams. We know that customer satisfaction is at the very heart of quality management and we need our teams to know that what they are doing has meaning and that they are doing well.
Every company in the room was benefitting from a Quality Management Systems framework that keeps them focused on 100pc of their business processes and procedures 100pc of the time. Allowing them to enjoy improved employee engagement, who in turn, provide an outstanding customer experience. That framework is The Power of The Q!
Quality systems are very clear in their focus. It’s all about enhancing customer satisfaction, by meeting and, if at all possible, exceeding the customers’ requirements.
The Q Mark framework is also clear that no one individual should be driving this. Everyone is responsible for Quality. The bottom line is that, if you are in a job, you are in the job of enhancing customer satisfaction. It’s not about spreadsheets, attending meetings or writing up the minutes. It’s about enhancing the customer experience…always! It’s about doing whatever it takes to support your customer, and always having their back.
The National Q Mark Awards recognise and reward the efforts of a company and their staff and they also raise awareness of the winners’ brand and the specific solutions they are offering the market. These awards can set a company apart from their competitors and differentiate the quality of its solution from others. It’s important to recognise that The National Q Mark Awards can make a company more visible. They can attract new customers and new employees by giving a company an edge over its competitors.
The National Q Mark Awards also celebrated a fantastic milestone this year – 35 years of rewarding excellence and honouring successes.
The Quality Approved programme was launched in 1982 by a group of ‘Quality Pioneers’ around Ireland. A fantastic group of volunteers who had the vision of consistently good ‘product & customer service’. 35 years later, customer satisfaction is still at the core of every single thing that the team behind the Q does!
As a business-to-business organisation (B2B), we are extremely proud of the fact that when it comes to Quality Management and The Q Mark, the real winner is the consumer. The consumer can purchase a product or service with The Q Mark logo in the full knowledge that the company has processes in place that put customer requirements at the heart of their business DNA.