I'm perceived as being harsh by people

I believe in doing things rightly, i follow procedures and will be flexible if need be . I apply this to my job and try to get everyone do things rightly. I play a sort of quality assurance role. But i am being perceived as being harsh by my colleagues. People see me and start to murmur things like 'oh she's coming, who knows what she would say i did wrong this time' If i don't get them to correct these errors, our quality standards will be in jeopardy. I also can't make the corrections myself, else my own job would suffer. But i feel terrible imagining what colleagues think of me. My boss keeps commending my effort and has expressed that things have become very tidy since i took up the role. I love the job but i don't like how others feel about me. Not sure what to do. Any advise please?

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IHateMyLife0MeDie · 46-50, M

I guess try to show them the good thing that happens whenever they do the corrections? Maybe present with graph how things have become better since you were there, but don't emphasize yourself, emphasize the hardwork of those people who did the corrections. Maybe your boss has presented a graph of the quality improvements, and just ask for it and your boss might even do a presentation with you.

Or talk to your boss about changing his presentation and that when he talks to the others to emphasize what good their corrections did.

MaryN · 36-40, F

@IHateMyLife0MeDie A good number of them have confessed to me how things have improved. But the same people who confessed their satisfaction with the level of improvement today, will start grumbling about how bureaucratic you are being tomorrow.

IHateMyLife0MeDie · 46-50, M

Well goodluck. It looks like you're trying your best. Maybe they're taking what you're doing personally? Are they also able to come to you for concerns and questions before you even go to see their work?

Well I don't think I'm so good with understanding people myself.

Hope you find your answer.

I'll just leave you with an interesting story of Richard Feynman, that scientist with the colorful personality.

"What they had to do was work on IBM machines--punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly.
I said the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited:"We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" Now they knew what the numbers meant: If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released and so on. They now know what they were doing.
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.
So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was they were doing. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, they now did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast."
--Richard Feynman, Los Alamos from Below