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Big Ideas
Marcus Buckingham, Author: “First, Break all the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” and “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” from “Fast Company” interview, August 2001.
Buckingham points out that the beliefs and behaviors of middle managers are important determinants of workplace strength. The middle managers are the “keepers” of the workplace culture. It is important to measure performance in ways that really matter, linking employee morale, customer satisfaction, and employee “engagement.”
The traditional measure of “making numbers” does nothing to improve or support a customer focused, strong and vibrant workplace. The knowledge and talent inside the company can deliver solutions to business problems better than using benchmarks to measure your company against others. CEOs fixate on “How is our average performance improving over time?” and “How do we stack up against our competitors?” The more important measure is the ratio of employees who are “engaged” (loyal and productive) to those who are not engaged (just putting in time) or disengaged (unhappy and spreading discontent). Bettering the Improvement starts with getting the operations people of the company into contact with the customers. Let them hear the customers’ words. A positive relationship with customers and employees is the most important thing that differentiates your company’s value proposition from your competitors’. Aligning Process to Customer Outcomes Allen Webber founding editor “Fast Company” September 2001,According to the executives, “Gaps in distribution, fulfillment and inventory management detract from an end-to-end customer experience.” Furthermore, “no matter what channel you’re talking about or working through, the challenge for the company is to focus on its customer’s specific individual needs.” Webber quotes them as saying, “The problem as I see it is that we’re so enamored with providing what we need to fulfill the transaction, we forget to provide what we need to have in order to build a relationship.” Weber concludes, “Ultimately, customers want a relationship…that reflects their attitudes… Consumers want to invest in the relationship.” In short, “Forward thinking companies always base their measurements on customer outcomes. Are you lining up your reward and compensation structure around customer outcomes? That’s what matters in the end.” The implication of this message for the corporation was clear. “The only way to succeed at this is to drive the customer centric mentality down into the organization. Get the developers into contact with the customers.” What Webber heard about creating a customer focus was that a company must “change the nature of the conversation with the customers. Find the biggest pain point, and then go to work to reduce it.” The executives recommended using “an old tool, the balanced score-card. Look at efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. Draw the link between [employee morale], customer satisfaction and profitability. It is the fastest way to remind companies that they are in business to serve customers.” Finally, they emphasized the need to “move from the transactional to the experiential… build customer participation into your brand and make the relationship one that is based on experience.”
Making Life Easier for the Customer
From Michael Hammer, Author of “The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate in the Decade,” (Crown Business, 2001) Hammer is blunt in his analysis: “Customers are no longer supplicants for scarce goods… Roles have changed and sellers have become supplicants for scarce buyers.” He believes that, “Companies that re-engineer to face the customer, to serve the customer and to make life easier for the customer will flourish. Those that don’t will perish.” In his opinion, “Financial measures--profitability, return on investment, discounted cash flow or any of the technically complex measures used by financial engineers--tell you little, if anything, of what you need to know about your business.” The fact is that “the fundamental language of business is about things like customer satisfaction, speed and error rates.” Looking to the near future, Hammer predicts “the next big thing that will dominate business discourse for the coming decade is the destruction of walls between enterprises.” In that transition, “Further reengineering will depend on qualities that emanate from the right side of the brain: devotion, trust, empathy, and all of their touchy-feely cousins.” Hammer believes that the new leader “must be a charismatic persuader, someone to whom others can relate - a person who can set sights higher than next quarter’s earnings report. They have a sense of empathetic identification.” Andy Pearson of Tricon, interviewed by David Dorsey, Fast Co., August 2001 In commenting about fostering positive attitudes within an organization, Pearson told Dorsey that, “Great leaders find a balance between getting results and how they get them. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that getting results is all there is to the job. They go after results without building a team or without building an organization that has the capacity to change. Your real job is to get results and to do it in a way that makes your organization a great place to work--a place where people enjoy coming to work instead of just taking orders and hitting this month’s numbers.”Pearson quotes Tricon CEO Novak in saying that when these principles are applied, “Our same store sales will go up, not down. You never go down when you’re satisfying customers. We’re a company of customer maniacs.” For Pearson, the real lesson is that, “Ultimately it’s all about having more genuine concern for the other person. There’s a big difference between being tough and being tough-minded. There’s an important aspect that has to do with humility. But I’ve been modestly disappointed at how hard it is to get leaders to act that way. I think it’s going to take a generation of pounding away on this theme. We’ve got a half dozen or so real leaders in our company, but we don’t have 20 or 30. You know what it takes? Role models”. |
