Developing our Leadership Body of Knowledge

Our first step in creating our Body of Knowledge (BOK) was to do a brain dump of all possible topics that relate to leadership, including annotation and references. We eventually boiled this down to the following 10 topics: Visioning, Communication. Motivation, Appreciation of a System, Strategic Planning, Change Management, Conflict Management, Coaching/Mentoring, Well-Being, and Theories of leadership.

You could fill several books on any one of these topics and that is beyond our current capability to complete. Besides, by the time a book is finished, new developments will have rendered it out of date. Our strategy has been to write primers, newsletter articles and hold webinars on each topic. Each primer has some basic principles, along with citations of the key sources. The table below shows where we are in this process.
 

BOK Categories	Related Publications and Events
​Visioning – Creating a set of guiding principles or statement that represents your organization’s reason for existence and provides inspiration for the daily actions of the people in that organization
Communication - Connecting people to the strategies, tactics, and directions you want to deploy	Communication for Leaders  (Primer) Enhancing your personal quality (Primer)
Motivation – Making sense of the theories and methods that govern the action or lack of action of the people that make up your organization	Employee Motivation (Primer) Sustaining a continuous improvement deployment (Primer) Employee Engagement  (Primer)
​Appreciate a system – Thinking about and leveraging the influence of the higher-level interactions between Divisions, departments, and processes.  Avoiding sub-optimization by considering the complexity of the end to end process in which your work functions	What’s your problem? (Primer) Appreciation of a system (Primer) Deming’s Profound Knowledge for Leadership (Primer) Measuring Performance (Primer)
Strategic Planning – Setting the goals,, direction, and high-level priorities for your organization
Change Management – Managing the dynamics of strategic, tactical and process deployment and sustainability	Leading through Change (Primer) Engagement Skills for Quality Professionals (Primer) Personal Change  Sustaining a continuous improvement deployment (Primer)
​Conflict Management – Directing and guiding disagreements from destructive to productive	Leading through Conflict  (Primer)
Coaching/Mentoring – Sharing the tips and tools that make us better leaders and	Basic Facilitation skills (Primer)  Engagement Skills for Quality Professionals (Primer) Put the Meet into Meetings  (Primer)
Theories of Leadership – A sampling of theories that can guide the development of your personal philosophy of how to lead	Meta-analysis of current thinking of leadership  (Primer) Chaos and Complexity  (Primer) Deming’s Profound Knowledge for Leadership  (Primer) Organizational Trust (Primer) Organizational Commitment (Primer) Human Capital (Primer)
Well Being – Personal and organizational wellness and its impact on how you develop your leadership skills	Personal Well Being (Primer) Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro (Primer) Uplifting power of play (Primer) Enhancing your personal quality (Primer)

NOTE: You will note that we are missing primers for Strategic Planning.  Anyone who would like to take on this study and writing chore should contact Dr. Carol “Charlie” Barton, who has proven to be a good coach and editor.
 

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Why do we not have a certification?

This is one of the most common questions our leadership team is asked. Most ASQ divisions create a BOK as a basis for certification on a specific area or topic, usually of a technical nature. Our division is not confident that we could provide a certification in leadership. While a person with a technical certification (i.e. CQE) will likely be able to operate successfully, there is far less a guarantee that a person with the requisite knowledge can be an effective leader. We believe that an effective leader is a combination of three key attributes: Knowledge, Experience and Personal Qualities.

While we could provide knowledge, our division has limited ability to provide opportunities to gain leadership experience. Therefore, leadership experience would likely need to be gained by the individual in their current or future roles. In addition to knowledge and experience, an effective leader needs certain personal qualities, such as curiosity, courage, and integrity. It is important to note Deming was more of a moral philosopher than methodologist (Baker, 2016). While our teaching addresses these issues, we are not ready to certify the moral fitness of others. We believe that the study of the theory, tools, and methods in the ten categories that make up our body of knowledge will provide a strong foundation or enhancement of a person’s ability to lead when they possess these personal qualities and have the opportunity to gain experience. And remember, the three attributes constitute a system. If any one of the three components is missing, the system will not function.
 

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References:
Baker, E. M., The Symphony of Profound Knowledge: W. Edwards Deming’S Score for Leading, Performing and Living in Concert. iUniverse. Kindle Edition, 2016.