Total Quality Management:
An Old Idea Worth Remembering

I first encountered Total Quality Management while studying organisational behaviour during my MBA studies. What interested me was its practical view of business: understand what customers value, involve the people doing the work, and keep improving how the organisation delivers it.

That thinking stayed with me. As a business developer and advisor, I often find myself trying to understand the other side of the table. What does the customer actually need? What matters to the employee? What is the other party trying to achieve? Listening carefully can reveal a better solution than the one you arrived ready to propose.

TQM gave me a useful framework for thinking about those questions. It is an old idea, but one worth revisiting.

What TQM actually means

Total Quality Management is an organisation-wide approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction and continual improvement. Quality becomes part of how the whole business operates, with leadership, employees, processes and decisions contributing to the result.

Its development drew on the work of quality thinkers including W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and Kaoru Ishikawa, and on the evolution of quality management in post-war Japan. TQM became a prominent management framework in the 1980s. Its principles remain visible today in quality management systems, ISO standards, Lean and Six Sigma, although these approaches have their own distinct methods and purposes.

For a smaller business, that history can sound rather distant. Yet the questions are familiar. Can customers reach us when they need us? Are we repeatedly fixing the same mistakes? Are we developing something people actually want? Have we asked the employees who deal with the problem every day?

People sometimes apply principles consistent with TQM without ever using the name. Two experiences from my own career illustrate what that can look like.

A better schedule and a lunchtime sale

When I worked as the office manager of a publishing company, our telephone reception hours were 08:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00. The office closed for lunch, precisely when some customers might have had time to call.

I wanted to extend coverage to 07:00–18:00, including lunchtime. Rather than work out a schedule on my own, I brought together our full-time receptionist and the two additional receptionists and discussed what we needed.

They more or less explained the solution to me themselves. One preferred to work early; another preferred to work late. Their preferences fitted together, and we arrived at an arrangement that worked better around their children and private lives while giving the business the coverage I wanted.

On the very first day, a salesperson picked up a lunchtime call and closed a large advertising sale.

That sale was an immediate result, rather than proof of every possible long-term benefit. But it made the value of the change very clear. We had opened a window for business that our previous schedule had kept closed.

What I remember most is how straightforward the solution became once the right people were involved. I set the objective, and they helped design an arrangement that worked. Their knowledge of their own circumstances was part of the solution.

Stop guessing what customers want

Another experience came through a software company from which my business had bought a turnkey solution. The supplier continually developed its product according to what it believed its customers and market wanted.

Eventually, it established an advisory board, and I was invited to join as a customer. We could now share feedback and ideas directly with the company in a structured way.

The value came largely through constant small improvements. Customers could explain what helped, what caused difficulties and what they actually needed. From my experience on that board, the software became much better.

Just as valuable was the development the company could avoid. Some features it thought we wanted were things we neither wanted nor needed. Listening earlier helped it avoid spending money building them.

I will keep the company and product details confidential, but the lesson applies widely: assumptions about customers deserve to be tested with customers.

An advisory board is one way to do that. A small business might begin with a handful of conversations. The important part is making customer understanding a regular input into decisions, then following through on what you learn.

Set the goal and empower the people

These experiences helped shape how I approach business. I want to understand the people affected by a decision and give them a meaningful role in improving it.

ISO’s quality management principles similarly emphasise customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, improvement and evidence-based decision-making. That provides a useful foundation for combining clear direction with employee involvement.

Empowerment still needs purpose. People need to understand the objective, what they can decide and what constraints they must work within. They also need management to listen and act.

In the publishing company, the objective was clear: longer telephone coverage. Within that requirement, the receptionists helped find a workable schedule. In the software company, customer feedback gave the developers a better understanding of where their effort would create value.

Of course, interests do not always fit together so neatly. Customers may request conflicting features, and an employee’s preferred arrangement may be difficult to accommodate. Listening gives you better information for making those decisions. It does not remove the responsibility to choose.

AI adoption benefits from a total quality foundation

I think this approach deserves particular attention when businesses consider AI and automation. A tool can make a process faster, but the business still needs to decide whether the process serves a useful purpose.

Before investing, I would ask what needs to improve, for whom, and how we will judge the result. Talk to the people doing the work. Examine customer frustrations. Identify unnecessary steps and recurring problems. Then consider where technology can help.

The software advisory board offers a useful reminder here. Faster development would have made unwanted features cheaper to build, perhaps, but customer feedback helped the company avoid building them at all.

That is a different kind of improvement, and potentially a more valuable one.

Start with one thing worth improving

You can begin applying these principles to one recurring problem in your business. Choose something specific: missed enquiries, repeated corrections, slow handovers or work customers do not value.

Define what a better result would look like. Involve the people closest to the problem and, where appropriate, the customers affected. Make a manageable change, check what happens and adjust accordingly.

For me, the lasting appeal of TQM is that it encourages a business to keep learning from the people it serves and the people who make it work. My receptionists knew how to create a better schedule. We, as software customers, knew which improvements would help us.

The useful next move was to ask, listen and give that knowledge somewhere to go.