Improve Quality By Achieving Excellence

Have you ever had to burn down a lot of bugs to hit a release date? Do you have OKRs to reduce the number of production bugs or incidents?

The messaging around these initiatives often centers around improving quality. Of course, no one is against quality; customer reports are clear that quality is an issue and something must be done.

Unfortunately, these metrics-driven approaches often come with review meetings where people are held to account for their failure to achieve target metrics. It can be easy for this approach to create perverse incentives and an unmotivated team.

In his book Turn The Ship Around, L. David Marquet describes how he inherited a team that was performing poorly. He found a culture that lacked initiative and was highly focused on the avoidance of errors. People were afraid to do anything, for fear of being called out in reviews. Your OKRs and efforts to hit them may lead to a culture of fear and a lack of ownership, as it did on Marquet’s team.

Marquet transformed his team into one that strove to achieve excellence. A lack of errors would be a by product of having excellence. Key tools he employed in making this shift:

• Establish clarity. What does excellence look like? Create a positive vision the team can aspire towards. As Simon Sinek notes in The Infinite Game, this shouldn’t even be an achievable vision, as a distant standard can serve to engage people forever.
• Increase competence. Look to the system as to why errors are introduced. Do people know their technical domains? Does the team have the skills to collaborate and make decisions? Build a deliberately developmental organization where upskilling is part of the culture, as Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan show how to do in their book An Everyone Culture.
• Divest control. As the team internalizes the vision, and acquires the skills to get there, you can begin to push decision making to individuals and teams. Marquet introduces the idea of people establishing their intent explicitly, which allows leaders to become more comfortable with releasing decision making control.

This approach enables you to take advantage of parallelism and scale in your organization to achieve a larger objective, without creating an atmosphere of fear and blame.

This is a lightly edited version of a LinkedIn Post.