The role that a leader plays in addressing the challenges that a business faces when aiming to achieve excellence is essential. According to Deming, a leader is “a coach, not a judge,” which means that leaders are responsible for training their employees and planing the work to ensure that excellence can be achieved. These people can help align the work of the employees with the vision of the organization with the ultimate goal of achieving the organization’s objectives.
EFQM excellence model suggests that leaders are the enablers of the results. They have to communicate effectively to help the employees understand the changes that are being made, which will affect the results of people, customers, and society. Due to the fact that leadership differs significantly from management, in a way that leaders help their organizations deal with change, while managers mainly focus on developing plans for coping with a capacity of change, ensuring that tasks are completed, budgeting, and another day to day tasks necessary to support the work of employees.
Leaders can use their competencies and impact to develop a changing picture, communicate it to the stakeholders, conduct a roadblock analysis, remove these obstacles, implement the change, and monitor the process to make adjustments as necessary. The success of EFQM, in general, relies significantly on the leadership team and their commitment to this model as the main element of managing quality and change. There are several tools that can help leaders carry out the change in accordance with the EFQM model.
The Force Field Analysis, for example, allows assessing the positive and negative factors that impact the ability to implement a change since one can examine two groups of organization factors – the ones supporting the existing state of things and the ones that can help change the organization. According to Shrivastava et al., it is “the systematic analysis of a wide range of factors affecting any problem. The tool has a wide application; however, from a managerial perspective, it allows one to adequately evaluate the factors that should be addressed or monitored to ensure that the changes are successful.