Type A personalities, or high powered, high achieving people make the best Six Sigma Champions. It is not enough to be a good diplomat in the Six Sigma culture, or to be fearless in your approach to life and business. Champions must be good in business and all operations interactions, project selection, rule implementation as well as being able to manage the overall pace of the operation.

The best Champion candidates know their business and industry from the inside out. They are very knowledgeable about the in-house technology employed by their company to manufacture their product. Six Sigma Champions oversee the entire Six Sigma operation, as well as coach and mentor the Six Sigma Black Belts who are the experts on the core process and core management. Six Sigma Champions need to understand when to jump into the project and when to stand back and let the Black Belts handle the situation. Champions must also ensure that all levels of the business objectives, from top to bottom, are in alignment and functioning as one. By the same token, all project reviews must be done with this alignment goal in mind. Reviews should never, ever be used to micromanage the Black Belts.

Selecting the project is the first task. This is followed by study and data collection, which is followed by implementation. Problems can and will crop up at the very beginning, and it usually comes when the Six Sigma Champion attempts to match the right Black Belt with the right project. It is still not understood why this is always a problem, although it seems to be a universal problem. Some Six Sigma experts feel Champions view this particular decision as a career maker or breaker, rather than what it is, which is a career expanding opportunity.  Six Sigma providers counsel businesses to improve upper and lower level interactions as a means of smoothing out this shaky place in the process.

In the initial stage of Six Sigma deployment, one or more people are selected to initiate the change. Most corporations prefer to use in-house people for this and the main reason behind this mindset is money. It costs less to use your own people than it does to bring in an outside consultant. The only concern for the initiators is the success of the roll out, and nothing else. The best Six Sigma roll outs are always done by Champions who have constructed a plan, complete with goals, targets and objectives, all designed to increase customer satisfaction.