The Quality Mindset
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Wayne Dyer
It takes a mindset. While I initially intended to focus this post the mindset required to be successful in the Quality job profession, it’s actually turning out to be broader than that. After all, many books and studies have explored just how powerful our minds are and how we can use this to our advantage.
In the Quality job profession, you tend to deal with quality problems day in and day out. It’s easy to get discouraged when all you see are the mistakes being made by someone (a member of your team) or something (your company) that you care about. However, if you adjust your mindset to instead focus on the learning opportunities that each quality problem provides, you can actually really enjoy this type of role.
Mistakes are GOING TO happen!
Even robots cannot produce perfect process outputs every. single. time. Getting discouraged because a mistake happened is like getting discouraged when you get stopped at a red light during your morning commute.
You should EXPECT mistakes!
Mistakes are the greatest learning opportunity we are afforded each and every day. If we choose to use them as a learning experience and find ways to never make those same mistakes again, we create a cycle of continuous improvement, always striving to get better. Sometimes our processes are improved to the point that the mistakes we are making are only a fraction of a percentage of total output (or total opportunities). We should still strive to collect the data, analyze it, choose the top trends, and improve them.
You can apply this same mindset in all that you do. I challenge you to:
Choose to take your attitude and thought process into your own hands.
Choose to own the mistakes you make, learn from them, and put processes in place so that you cannot make those same mistakes again.