Has it ever occurred to you? Maybe top management hasn’t bought in to this whole quality thing yet because they don’t know how.

Maybe it’s this complex monster, from their perspective, and so they are leaving it to you to run the show, while they go about the business of running the business.

There seems to be a consensus that the biggest challenge in creating a culture of quality is getting support from upper management.

😩 How do you feel when you’ve got a million things to do and something techy goes wrong? — I just want to call an IT person and let them look after it. I don’t want to know the ins and outs of what is wrong and what they have to fix and how they plan to fix it. Just fix it and tell me what to do to avoid this again. Please and thank you.

🤯 Maybe that’s how your boss feels about the quality management system. Because, let’s face it, it can be monstrously complex with all kinds of finicky details.

So, keep it simple. 🎯

When you explain things to the boss, keep it simple enough that she (or he) can quickly grasp the gist, but don’t weigh her down with unnecessary details that she doesn’t need to know. Or use words that she has to pretend she’s familiar with.

✔️ Be intentional and selective in what you say.

✔️ Speak to the boss’s pain points and not your pain points.

✔️ Use words that the boss is used to using

✔️ Use a natural “person” voice and not a heavy-duty, impersonal “science” or “technical” voice.

✔️ Appeal to the emotions by wrapping your advice, suggestions, or information in a story. (Or case study, anecdote…you get the idea…)

✔️ Constantly remind them, through evidence and data, if possible, of the relevance of quality management to the success of business management.

Getting buy-in from top management is critical. And it’s also clearly a challenge. It’s so much easier for quality to become a company-wide mindset when the leaders lead with it in mind. And you have to get it into the mind of the leaders.

So explain it simply. Make it easy for them to understand. Help them see how it will help them achieve their goals.

Thanks for reading!