QA Managment: Part One, The Servant Attitude

Throughout my personal and professional career I have had to balance getting the work done and ensuring the team is happy. Yes, Happy. Why? Because Happy People are exceptionally productive and provide continuous improvement. Serving my team, managing with a Servant Attitude, contributes to a happy team. It can be quite challenging when one works in Quality Assurance.

Quality Assurance has long been the proverbial “Step Child.” For most Project Managers, we’re the Evil Step Child. Development doesn’t like us because our job focuses on finding problems with their created code. The Business doesn’t care for us because we let them know that their requirements are ambiguous, and they probably won’t get their product as quickly as they like. I could go on for pages, but you get the point.

Thus the conundrum: How to work with a servant attitude while performing quality assurance efforts.

I am going to focus the rest of this year on this puzzle. With me, you will explore the “secret” of the SERVE management theory (used by top businesses like Chik-Fil-A ®) while experiencing how to use it in the “Real QA World.” I hope to contribute to your leadership skills, while tackling the specific issues we, in QA, face.

If you would like to follow along in the book, its title is “The Secret: What Great Leaders Know - and Do”.

What does the Servant Attitude in leadership mean? Ken Blanchard defines it as:

Servant Leadership
"Put simply, effective leadership starts in the inside with your decision to serve rather than to be served. This Servant Leadership is grounded in humility and focused on the greater good."

QA often feels self-serving. Since we are at the end (regardless of development methodology used,) we need to be assertive with our needs. Key words, Our Needs. This is our first mistake. The minute we focus on our needs, we are no longer focused on serving. We begin an adversarial relationship that continues to haunt us with all projects going forward.

How do we change this focus? First you must decide to serve rather than be served. Serve in any way you can, every day, to every one.

Homework #1: Ask yourself what you can do in the next week to become the Servant Leader. Take notes on these ideas and how you implement them. What are your results?