Why are life lessons learned in sports so inspiring? Maybe it’s living the stories of our favorite teams, seeing them succeed and endure heartbreaking losses after giving their all. When it’s all over, players and coaches seem to have a knack for distilling their experiences in a way that rings true for many.
Not surprisingly, a lot of sports wisdom also relates to the practice of quality management. Here are a few of my personal favorites.
“The principle is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.” – Steve Young
This one gets to the philosophy behind quality management as a whole, and it’s also a guiding principle behind continuous process improvement measures in ISO 9000 for Quality Management.
Continuous process improvement is all about competing against yourself. In the quality world, you can’t look to the competition to set targets for reducing nonconformances or establishing a timeline for a new product rollout. Instead, you’re trying to improve over last month’s or last year’s performance, analyzing your own data to see where you can make gains.
Doing this effectively means leveraging the Quality Management System (QMS) to evaluate both past performance and future possibilities (which we’ll discuss shortly).
“Before every shot, I go to the movies in my head.” – Jack Nicklaus
Athletes commonly use visualization to plan how they will perform. Similarly, an important role of quality management is visualizing risk and its impact on the business. This is what allows the company to explore potential opportunities and make informed decisions.
By using quantitative Risk Management tools in everyday tasks, quality shines a light on something invisible—risk—to achieve things that might otherwise seem impossible.
"The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." – Phil Jackson
Quality management is a team sport. Employee Training plays a critical role in building the capacity of individual team members, which is why it’s so important to:
However, the ability of team members to perform also relies on the department as a whole. No one person can do everything, or do it right 100% of the time—that’s where the team comes in with support. A strong Quality Management System (QMS) makes a huge difference, improving team communication and collaboration to help you work as a unit.
"It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” – John Wooden
How you manage the little things is a good indicator of how you manage your larger responsibilities. It’s true whether you’re talking about a single nonconformance, customer complaint or out of spec material.
That doesn’t mean you make a federal case out of every little thing. It just means nothing goes unnoticed, and each issue is evaluated as a potential opportunity to improve. This is where launching a Corrective Action linked with risk tools comes into play.
“It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.” – Vince Lombardi
Ultimately, even with a rock star QMS based on advanced technology, there will be mistakes. It’s not just that technology relies on humans using it properly. There’s also a certain amount of unpredictability in production systems that constantly needs to be managed.
Through all this, companies survive. They even survive big mistakes, like nationwide recalls and defects in millions of products (just look at the iPhone 6’s bending problem).
As our coaches would remind us, how we handle mistakes is the true measure of a champion. Your Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) system can make or break you, so you want to make sure your system:
Granted, the daily responsibilities of quality management rarely take on the highly charged atmosphere of a championship game. But true athletes know the real work goes on behind the scenes. Success isn’t just determined by how you act in one critical moment—it’s also a function of your day-in, day-out determination to do things right.