An Outward Focus Toward Clients - 180

Turning around an organization, requires an outward focus toward the client. This comes right down to individual behavior. Where is everyone looking - inward? Or outward?

Often, when I come into an organization the first thing I notice is, where key people are spending the bulk of their time. Also, where they are spending the key hours of the day.

You know what I find? I find poor manaagement systems and a poor leadership practice. Sales is down, therefore "we put in place reporting systems to see what people (especially sales) are doing every day." Then, the financial people put in quality systems, that require sales people to fill out more paperwork on the front end to save their staff time.

Soon the entire organization is facing inwards. And the culture now is about filling out reports and reporting and meeting about reports, and the meeting turn into reports of the meetings of the reports, and then more questions and then more written emails about why this wasn't done, which gets sent down to the person in front of the client to write and then it is rewritten by management, and then management reads it or has gone on to another crisis and it is no longer important.

So how do you stop this malpractice? It ain't easy. Becuase the stupidity is now engrained in people's thinking and in processes. And worst of all - people who don't have client facing positions in the company - but who have the ear of the President, or CEO or Managing Director. And the new bad practices, become the new normal.

Stopping it requires recognizing the problem. See the next post.