Leadership and Commitment
(Clause 5.1 of ISO 9001: 2015, ISO 14001: 2015 and ISO 45001)
You are the Management Representative or Person-In-Charge of ISO 9001, ISO 14001 & ISO 45001 Management System in your organisation.
“So with the new ISO standard requirement, what do you want from me?” This may be the question to you from your Top Management.
“Leadership & Commitment, Sir.”, you said. “You mean all the while, we are not demonstrating Leadership & Commitment?”, said your Top Management.
Your Top Management is correct. Demonstrating “Leadership & Commitment” is not new. It’s been there in the previous versions and they had been demonstrating it through involvement in planning, decision making, reviewing, monitoring, etc. So why we are now getting excited about this “Leadership & Commitment” phrases? Emphasis is probably the word. In the new 2015 version, there is a dedicated clause 5.1 on “Leadership and Commitment” listing down the areas which the Top Management can demonstrates, e.g. taking accountabilities for effectiveness, ensuring adequate resources, ensuring intended results, promoting improvements, etc.
Management Staff and Leader could be different in terms of the ways they do things. The former is mostly about managing processes objectively to meet the goal. Leadership on the other hand is about demonstrating certain quality of behaviours to meet the goal. See below brief illustration:
As such, in relation to clause 5.1, your Top Management will need to explicitly showcase their Leadership and Commitment through visible and “hands on” involvements.
So, what can your Top Management do? The following shows some examples to demonstrate the involvement in “Leadership & Commitment”:
Examples of Leadership’s Demonstration
So, Auditors… Are you ready to audit your Top Management?!