Quality Leadership Roles — what's the real story?
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I noticed Kat Obring talking about the lack of leadership roles. I love to see it. It's a big reason why we have our Leading with Quality conversations, event and community efforts around it.
In a recent LinkedIn post she says:
"Why are there so few senior quality leadership roles?
We talk about quality being “everyone’s responsibility”, but at senior levels, that often means it’s no one’s job to lead it. In this blog post, I unpack a theory I’ve been circling for a while, about why quality is rarely represented at the top table, and what that means for both strategy and careers.
Would love to hear what others think:
Have you ever worked somewhere with a Chief Quality Officer?
What role does your leadership team play in shaping quality?
What would a proper seat at the table look like?"
She goes on to explore it further in a blog post: https://kato-coaching.com/why-is-there-no-chief-quality-officer
I started writing a comment that then got a bit too long, and it would only get forever lost in LinkedIn, so here I am sharing it as a memory instead.
I think there are more leadership roles than we realise, just not necessarily with the job titles.
In a Leading with Quality Conversation I had today, a Principal Quality Engineer role was mentioned in reference to being perceived the same as a 'Head of Test' role. And in the same conversation that role leading role for testing being seen equal to leader level for engineering, cloud and data roles. I think I understood this correctly (👋 Nigel Brookes-Thomas)?
But it's not the first time I've heard this, many Quality leaders are reporting to CTOs and have other product or engineering colleagues at their same level. They may not have a large amount of people reporting to them because of the quality of culture where more people are taking responsibility for quality, but increasingly I'm seeing quality people having more senior roles.
I've been asking about org charts, or who leaders report to and who reports to them to better understand where quality sits (or leads)... and I think there is something in understanding org charts to really understand whether quality has a seat at the table. At the moment I'm optimistic that it increasingly is. I'd love to explore this more though, it still feels early days to really be getting a good picture.
It's also clear that there has been a real change in the approach to quality in the past 5 years or so, which is a huge reason why we are doing the Leading With Quality series. Change should be expected, but there also seems to be proportionally more change for Quality, or at least it feels that way.
To dive deeper into this I've started a Club post to see if people will share their org structure:
And here are the Leading With Quality conversations:
https://www.ministryoftesting.com/collections/leading-with-quality-conversations
The image for this memory was adapted from one that I believe John Cutler created with AI. I noticed Quality wasn't represented, so I got Bug to fix this terrible situation.
