Senior Management's Role in Successful Quality Improvement Programs

The Role of Leadership
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The Role of Leadership
Senior managers are central to the success of any organizational initiatives to improve the quality of their products and services. Laureani and Antony (2018) found that senior management provides essential leadership in quality improvement initiatives. They set the direction and tone within the organization, ensuring employees work toward set goals and objectives. In other words, they cultivate and maintain a culture for continuous improvement. This paper explores senior- and middle-managers’ roles in driving quality improvement programs.
Past recipients of the Baldrige Award offer great examples of quality improvement initiatives that succeed due to the roles played by managers. For example, in 2019, Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC) in Iowa won the award for its quality improvement program, led by its VP & Quality Improvement Officer Karen Kiel Rosser (Harsanto, 2021). She acted as a cheerleader and role model, providing support and resources to their quality improvement team. Rosser also set out the vision for the organization, using the tagline “Doing What’s Right” as a rallying point for staff. MGMC encouraged staff to value patients’ feedback and incorporate it into caregiving strategies (NIST, 2020a). According to Chopra and Fernando (2020), this approach offered a platform for middle managers and other employees to collaborate around activities that facilitated process improvements. Ultimately, these improvements eliminated delays initially common in patient care.
Similarly, Adventist Health Castle in Hawaii won the award in 2017 for their program, led by their CEO (Kathy Raethel) and senior management team (NIST, 2017). They acted as decision-makers, setting clear goals and metrics for their program and providing the necessary resources to achieve the highest quality of patient care. Another, the Baldrige Award recipient, Elevations Credit Union, had a senior management team committed to quality improvement through a strong culture of collaboration and innovation (NIST, 2020b). The CEO led the charge by emphasizing the importance of quality and setting high standards, leading to improvements that increased customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and raised employee engagement.
Furthermore, senior management must collaborate with middle management when developing performance metrics for measuring and mon...