Deming as Servant Leader

W. Edwards Deming is the hero of many a Quality advocate. He learned from Shewhart the Control Chart and the Shewhart PDSA (Plan Do Study Act) Cycle that is the core of contemporary performance improvement science and practice. (See the new Deming videos.) Deming was clear about Leadership he did not equivocate. Did he have the experience of Superperformance? Certainly. He was the central champion and pioneer of the global quality movement that transformed Japanese manufacturing, and in more and more enlighted areas, is transforming organizations all over the world today. Superperformance is within anyone's reach.

On Leadership, Deming had this to say:

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure, to help people do a better job and with less effort.

Deming's position was that the job of the leader was to use their authority and the resources at their disposal, to make life easier and better for the people doing the work. Deming saw how western management was tethered to a business paradigm of sub-optimization.

Mechanistic management operates with the opposite paradigm. Deming describes the Biazarro World when he wrote:

Most acts of supervision in management ... instead of providing help to people, accomplish just the opposite.

Was Optimization guru Deming a robust model of Servant Leadership? Absolutely.