Driving Improved Results – The Dance of Business

How often do you see an organizational chart with the CEO at the top, the Managers under him and the staff under the Managers. It looks like a triangle with the point at the top.

This business is structured to have top down management, and most likely the people at the bottom are the ones who have the most contact with the customers. How they interact and connect with the client will determine if the client feels unique, special and attended to. They also generally have the least decision making power, the least training, the least pay and the least influence on the rest of the organization even though they have the ear of the customer and the whole organization relies on the money received because they created a strong relationship with customers and clients.

The customer is not even in the picture. If you want customer loyalty (which has been shown to make businesses lots more profitable and sustainable),  the customer should be the focus of the picture and the people who interact with that customer need decision making ability, a great deal of respect and support.

What if we turned the triangle upside down? What if we put loyal customers at the top, looked at the moments of truth as the points at which the customers interact with the staff (where the rubber meets the road and all that uniqueness and attentiveness is expressed), and everybody else is supportive of making great interactions happen. The managers support the staff and the CEO supports the managers.

This is the distributed leadership model that many of the most forward thinking companies are now adopting because it drives profits, drives customer loyalty and drives employee retention. A key component is internal customer satisfaction, or creating a culture of engagement and empowerment.

Your employees will treat the customers the same way management treats them. You as the leader get to choose the model and create the company culture. Whether or not you become a great leader who purposely creates culture is your choice. You can choose to not care about culture and just take what comes, usually leading to indifference and lack of initiative on the part of your employees and customer/clients.

In the diagram above there are three components, People, Systems & Strategy. In any business these interact under the guidance of leadership to create internal customer satisfaction. Strategy is necessary to determine how the business will be in the world. Will it grow? Geographically? With new products? Penetrate deeper into an existing market? How will the profitability grow? Is it being prepped for an owner exit? Is it serving an economic interest or an altruistic interest? Is culture being proactively developed as a driving force of the profitability of the business?

Systems are necessary to standardize processes so they become efficient and costs are reduced. Rediscovering the wheel every time or having to recreate everything with every new employee is silly when systems and processes can be recorded in an operations manual eliminating trial and error.

As a coaching company a good deal of our work is done with the people and professional development part of the triangle, helping the leader to make conscious choices that lead to an engaged culture and loyal customers.

We call this next diagram a Kashbox as it does earn you cash. You probably already invest in the S&K which represent skills and knowledge, the knowing side of the Kashbox. You offer training sessions. Your industry association might require or provide continuing education credits.

But how about the attitudes and habits? These represent the doing side. This is where actual productivity resides,

•   work ethic,
•   the motivation to do a quality job,
•   commitment to achieve,
•   time management,
•   interpersonal communication

Sometimes our attitudes get stuck in self-fulfilling prophecies and self-limiting beliefs. It’s often said the individuals get hired for their skills and knowledge and get fired for their attitudes and habits.

Lack of execution is proportional to the gap
between the left and right sides of the box.

Let us help you narrow that gap. Our professional development formulaexplains more about how you and your people can get past self-fulfilling prophecies and self-limiting beliefs. We offer assessments to help you make the best hiring decisions and professional development to develop the attitudes and habits of your staff.  Our offerings focus just on the leader or on the whole organization (leader and employees).