Throughout my career I was fortunate to participate in many employee involvement initiatives. Each opportunity played a key role in my development as a manager.

It’s not rocket science to realize that top management commitment is one of the critical success factors in the deployment of organizational quality initiatives. While recognizing the importance of such commitment is easy, it’s not so easy to translate that into action.

My experience has proven what most experts propose is true. To be successful, employee involvement programs must have top management commitment, but middle management buy-in must also be obtained.

Also, it’s been my experience that quality professionals are important in coaching top managers to ‘walk the talk’ while assisting them to secure the required participation from all levels of the organization. Managers are expected to recommend effective actions, so they need to consider aspects such as organizational culture, competing priorities, and employee morale.

In a corporate position, I had oversight for organizational-wide ISO 9001 registration programs. At the time we had scores of facilities already achieving their registrations, while others were in their early planning stages.

In one such start-up, I was involved with senior management to communicate the initiative through the traditional means, but kick-off meetings were chaired by the facility’s top manager. In this meeting, the manager communicated the urgency of achieving quality system registration. At the time, most companies took 18-24 months to achieve certification. Due to customer demand, this timeline was insufficient.

As this initiative was cascaded, other means were deployed such as all-employee meetings, company-wide emails, memoranda posted on area bulletin boards, and articles published in the facility’s newsletter.

Even with other intense communications, the senior managers were concerned that the desired number of middle managers didn’t attend the introductory ISO 9001 training module. It was not hard to arrive at a consensus as to why this happened.

This facility was experiencing an impressive rate of growth. Its total number of employees over the last eighteen months had increased significantly. Several new products were being developed and brought to market, and they were installing new technologies to assist with implementation of an aggressive manufacturing ramp-up to meet customer demand. A lot of ‘irons in the fire’ with high priority.

Even though top management had informed everyone about the importance of achieving ISO 9001 registration quickly, the middle-managers and other support staff were busy with other priorities. We needed to find out what would motivate this group to consider the ISO 9001 training as a tool that could add value to their current priorities.

After meeting with senior managers, it was decided to combine some subtle hierarchical authority. Targeted groups of people were assembled into distinct training sessions that were in line with their backgrounds and professional experience. For each group, a top manager was assigned to facilitate that specific session.

The top managers sent invitations directly to the sponsored personnel. The top managers also sat through their area’s particular training sessions. They gave opening speeches while pointing out some fact or relevance relating the ISO 9001 framework to their specific functional area. After initially helping each manager prepare, I facilitated the training sessions but more in a supporting role letting the top manager take the lead.

All the training sessions were scheduled during lunch in the facility’s executive boardroom. Lunch, provided by the top manager, was served at the beginning of each session. These tactics produced outstanding results in creating the needed motivation.

The top managers had the opportunity to translate their commitment into visible actions by sponsoring groups of personnel, highlighting how the ISO 9001 process would bring value to their own areas, and taking an active role in the training sessions.

In an effort to achieve ISO 9001 registration quickly but efficiently, middle managers, after attending more detailed training, facilitated lower-level training sessions. Participating in this manner they became advocates for the initiative. Several of the middle managers attended ISO 9001 auditor training and participated as internal auditors. An impressive turn-around which helped this facility achieve registration in less than twelve months!

When done properly, quality professionals will usually find top managers willing to help in achieving improvements. Quality professionals should step forward to identify actions that can help top management lead by example. As with the above story, ask them to sponsor key actions and to attend training sessions along with everyone else. This gives the sense that ‘we’re all in this together.’

These actions are effective in showing that top management cares and are willing to dedicate time to the success of the initiative. Furthermore, top managers feel motivated by seeing their actions producing results.

First, determine what is wrong with the culture that prevents people from becoming engaged. It’s not always because they just don’t care so discovering what keeps people from participating is critical.

In this case, it was discovered that there were other important activities, and time had become a constraint. Getting top management engaged was key. Scheduling the training sessions in a way that better fit busy schedules, along with a free lunch in the executive dining room with an important top manager participating, helped motivate and attract the targeted population. This continues to be a roadmap used by this organization for other opportunities. Employee involvement pays dividends especially when properly orchestrated.