Presentation Tips for Quality Control Managers
By Daniel Harper · Career & Business
How should a quality control manager present defect results to a production team? Keep it about the task, not the people: show the defect, its cause and the check that catches it, using the real part where you can. Feedback that focuses attention on what to do differently tends to help, while feedback that focuses on how good or bad people are can make performance worse. Thank people for catching defects.
Quality control managers present results in several directions: to leadership in monthly reviews, to customers after a complaint, to suppliers whose parts failed. But the presentation that most affects quality happens on the floor, to the people who make the product. How defect results are shared with a shift can improve quality week after week, or make people defensive and quieter about problems.
Feedback can backfire
It seems obvious that telling a team about their defects will help them make fewer. The research is more cautious. In a large meta-analysis, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi found that although feedback improved performance on average, in more than a third of comparisons people who received feedback went on to perform worse than those who received none. Their explanation was about where the feedback directs attention: towards the task and what to do differently tends to help; towards the self, and how good or bad the person is, tends to help less or backfire.1
For a quality control manager, that is a direct instruction. "Line 2 had the worst defect rate this week" points attention at people. "Most of this week's rejects were short shots on the left-hand cavity; here's the part, here's what it looks like, here's the check at start-up that catches it" points attention at the task.
Show the real part
A chart of defect rates is abstract. The part itself is not. When you brief a shift about a defect, bring a good part and a bad one, let people handle them, and show exactly where the problem is and how to spot it. That does more for quality than any slide.
One defect at a time
A shift briefing that covers every defect type of the week teaches nothing. Pick the one that matters most this week, explain its cause and the check that catches it, and come back to it next week to show whether it fell.
Thank people for catching problems
The behaviour you want most from a production team is catching and reporting defects early. Thank people for it, publicly where they are comfortable with that. If the only time quality comes up is when something goes wrong, people learn to keep quiet about problems.
When the shift pushes back
A shift will sometimes push back: the defect was the material, the machine, the previous shift. Sometimes they are right. Take the objection seriously, check it, and come back with the answer at the next briefing. A quality manager who investigates pushback is trusted when they hold firm, and one who dismisses it is not.
Presenting to leadership
For leadership, present quality as trends against targets, with the top two or three issues each given a cause, an action, an owner and a date. Separate defects caught in-house from escapes to customers; they mean very different things. The habit of framing each measure the same way every month, covered in presentation tips for quality assurance managers, applies here too.
After a customer complaint
When a customer finds a defect, present it to them plainly: what happened, how many parts could be affected, how you have contained it, the root cause and the corrective action. Customers judge a supplier's quality system by how it responds to a failure as much as by the failure itself.
For the interview questions about this work, see behavioral interview questions for quality control managers, and for giving feedback people can use, how to give feedback that someone can use.
References
- Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254