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Management Commitment and Leadership is essential for an operation to realise goals related to both business success and continual improvement.  However, management and leadership are completely different attributes. Leaders are not always managers and some managers are poor leaders.

Business success is achieved by performing to agreed goals. To realise business success Management Commitment and Leadership should be applied according to a specific hierarchy of performance categories associated with business goals. The suggested performance hierarchy is safety, quality, cost and volume.

The safety performance category includes safety of the individual and the environment. Quality is an even broader performance category. This includes quality of operation output, quality of activity and outcomes, and quality of internal competencies and skills. Safety is paramount since good performance enables an operation to deliver quality. Management Commitment and Leadership in the areas of safety and quality deliver lowest unit output cost. Consequently, volume performance can then be readily adjusted to ensure minimal inventory and delivery managed according to market pull.

Management commitment provides the means and support for individuals within an operation to deliver performance that translates into achievement of goals. You know you have management commitment when the necessary resources and time are always made available. You know you have management commitment when managers deliver regular and consistent messages that encourage individuals to strive to achieve goals and also recognise good performance. Management Commitment means that routine and consistent effort is made to ensure everyone does understand operational performance goals and priorities, and how they as individuals contribute to achieving required performance. Business success and continual improvement however, come from leadership.

Leadership must be provided by the various teams within an operation. Teams of individuals are given responsibility and accountability for delivering their goals. Teams are linked and coordinated by team leaders operating as members of higher level teams. This leadership structure is needed to coordinate the efforts of teams to deliver goals in a proactive manner. This structure also provides the means for communication up and down the operation to assess performance against achievement of goals and manage progress regarding improvement activity. This means team members take leadership to identify opportunities for improving as part of routine activity and actively participate in implementation of improvements. In this way, managers share leadership with workers to realise performance goals.

So if you have consistent messages, recognise and reward performance focused on outcome targets, and availability of resources and time from organisational managers you have Management Commitment. If your people actively participate with management to set goals, review performance, execute activity, and implement improvement you have Leadership. In combination, you have Management Commitment and Leadership. How does your operation compare?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under People, Plant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.