As I write this, I will flat out say that I am not a management guru. However, I think with my many years of management experience that I am pretty good at calling out a bluff in organization management that has pretty much existed since my early days as a young lad just graduating from college and taking on a role as a business advisor.
Now even considering that I am writing this as a consultant, I will stand up and say that much about what you will read can be applicable in any industry. Here goes: one of the biggest flaws in organizations is that they don’t put a line item in the job description of everyone applying that they need to be able to meet customer needs.
I know this sounds so cliche and ordinary – but the problem is that so much time is spent trying to get the right knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to meet corporate goals and perform corporate actions that align to business processes and technical systems that corporations miss the boat in getting the right KSA to meet customer needs.
Just go through any of the major job sites and you will find the usual “skilled” driven job-need description that lists a series of technical (i.e., code, platform, database, etc) or business (analytical, management, etc.) needs that are common for anyone looking for work.
Case in point, I hear so many times that a new hire has joined a project team that couldn’t perform a task to support a client need as it wasn’t in their job description.
Now, I am not sure who the moron in the equation is here: the person who wrote A job description but not THE job description for the direct hire, or the idotic new hire who is simply performing a series of corporate acts to earn a paycheck without meeting the customer needs. What’s ends up happening here is that both the company and new hire lose.
On another point, I think companies are taking this fact for granted that everyone they hire will be customer-centric and will fit into the organization perfectly to meet customer needs. The problem is that some organizations don’t breed a culture that is customer-centric and they take for granted that the new hires will just figure it out.
What happens in extremely hierarchical organizations (and there are still a ton out there) is that there are so many layers between the customers, managers, executives and whomever is doing the work is that what is customer-centric becomes amiss and what ends up carrying precedence are those things that can be labeled as corporate-centric: essentially working to meet corporate needs and not customer needs.
Over time – and I see this everywhere is that the customer ends up become the very “middle managers of the enterprise” who think they know what the customer wants but are no where close to even understanding or fulfilling their need.
Why does this happen? Well a few things in my opinion:
- Companies lack centralized solution design capabilities that bring in management, solution developers, and the customer into an environment to collaborate to build solutions.
- The mission of projects are not clearly understood by all parties engaged in solution development. The answer is: keep it simple stupid and just get the customer involved throughout the solution design and development process.
- There are some ego minded people right in middle management who think because of their college degree, gray hairs, and “years” of experience that they know what is best to give to the customer, when any person off the street can button their lips by just asking the customer directly what they want and provide an exceptional service to meet their needs.
- Organizations rely heavily on policies and standard operations procedures and doing what is right based on best practices, directives and corporate memos to deliver solutions in line with corporate creed that they miss the mark completely that these have nothing to do with increasing corporate adoption of solutions and services.
- Innovation is lacking and reliance on cookie-cutter templates is increasing to build corporate worlds of adaptability and “one-size fits all” mentality to drive customer solutions that are not adoptable by customers.
- Processes are created in favor of extensive management reviews where everyone in a 30,000+ organization needs to truly lay eyes on what is developed so it is made “just right”. Problem is the amount of re-work performed to build the perfect solution that meets the “general corporate public”…hmmm….what happened to the customer here?
It’s obvious that something is broken and I just couldn’t figure a quick fix but I went back to Peter Drucker who said that one of the purpose of a business is to create a customer. It’s not rocket science: to win customers you just need to understand customers and meet their need. You don’t need a college degree to do this – just the right “degree” of thinking focused on understanding needs, delivering a solution to those needs, and providing continuous customer service to sustain delivered value.