Promoting Total Quality Management

You are a professional employed at a large urban medical center. You have been appointed to serve as a nonmanagerial member of a steering committee established to guide the implementation of TQM throughout the organization. The committee has been through a week of intensive education in TQM/performance improvement principles and has held the first two of what will be many weekly meetings to pave the way for translating the TQM philosophy into practical actions that can be implemented.

You are encouraged by what you have learned and experienced during these first few weeks; however, you are also conscious of the organization’s past failures with management by objectives (MBO) and quality circles, and you are aware of a fairly widespread tendency to regard such undertakings as dabbling in the latest management “flavor of the month.”

You attend the steering committee's second meeting and it ends late, leaving you only two minutes to get to your next commitment. As you leave the conference room and enter the hospital’s main corridor, a colleague, heading toward the same destination as you, falls into step beside you and asks, “What’s this total quality management all about? Looks to me like the same stuff that’s been pushed at us in different wrappers several times over the years, and it’ll probably go the same way. Nowhere. More fancy notebooks and reports that end up collecting dust.  Why should we think this will be any less of a waste of time and resources?”

You have less than two minutes available while on the move to provide your colleague with a positive response in a few sentences. Write out or record (using the recording feature above) your proposed response. Please note that although your response must be short, it should also be clear and accurate as possible. If you choose to record your response, please be sure to speak clearly and slowly so I can hear you.