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The new edition of The Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Handbook offers interesting insights on the challenges modern leaders and managers face daily.
"The Certified Manager of Quality/ Organizational Excellence is a professional who leads and champions processimprovement initiatives-everywhere from small businesses to multinational corporations-that can have regional or global focus in a variety of service and industrial settings. A Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence facilitates and leads team efforts to establish and monitor customer/supplier relations, supports strategic planning and deployment initiatives, and helps develop measurement systems to determine organizational improvement. The Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence should be able to motivate and evaluate staff, manage projects and human resources, analyze financial situations, determine and evaluate risk, and employ knowledge management tools and techniques in resolving organizational challenges."1
This description is taken from the introduction for the ASQ Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence certification program website, and it provides a framework for professionals who are seeking credentialing. Although The Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Handbook was developed as a primary reference for exam preparation, this book also serves as a compendium of useful information for practitioners. This excerpt presents information on leadership challenges-particularly those related to roles and responsibilities of leaders. Additional information from this book on roles and responsibilities of mangers is included in an online supplement at www.asq.org/pub/jqp.
"I believe leadership lies more in character than in technical competence, but these two are interwoven. As people grow in competence, they gain awareness of a new dimension of their character. Then, as they begin to develop that aspect of their character, they find that their competence abo increases. "2
-Stephen R. Covey
When is a manager not a leader? When is a leader not a manager? The answer to these questions begs for a precise definition of leader and manager. Yet, try as we often do to differentiate between the two roles, ambiguity creeps in to blur the line of demarcation. The fuzziness is exacerbated by common usage (or "misuse," depending on your point of view). One observation is that the title "leader" is rarely found on organizations' lists of position titles, although occasionally "team leader" may appear. Does this mean that a leader is some ethereal entity that doesn't truly exist in the...