I am always amazed at how much we learn when we produce quarterly results and tally up our metrics. This is typically a step on the path to holding a productive board meeting or corporate business review. Sometimes, the preparation for the meeting is just as valuable, if not more so, than the actual meeting because in preparing for the meeting we have to think critically about how to explain the results and what they mean. It forces us to step back and gain a deeper understanding of what is really going on.
When we look at the entire business, across all departments and functions, we see the mosaic of the company and how the pieces fit together. Stepping back and creating some space between the day-to-day tyranny of the urgent, and the broader strategic view of the business provides an opportunity to take it all in. It enables us to connect the dots and understand the interconnectedness of the whole. It also lets us discover patterns that emerge from the interactions between each group’s metrics, and enables us to explore the possibilities.
Consider a common example. What if we saw a spike in support tickets being passed to engineering for resolution. If we just look at engineering we see a need to assign more resources to drive down the backlog and address the ticket volume. However, with a little space from the urgent, we can ask questions. Most importantly, why are we seeing more tickets going to Engineering? Is it a result of recent product enhancements? Do we have a coding problem or a QA problem? Maybe the tickets reflect issues with old code that was never stressed, and for some reason customer applications have just exposed lingering hidden problems. If we dig a little deeper, maybe we will find that half of the tickets were resolved without the need for a code change. Is that a reflection of Support passing things to Engineering that should have been resolved without Engineering’s participation? Maybe the items passed were problems that did not require code, but to figure out the resolution required tools and data access that only engineers possess. If that is the case, then should we look further and figure out if we need more tools or training to equip support. Maybe we need to look at how we implement customer sites to see if something changed, or if we can preemptively avoid future issues by changing our implementation strategy. That might make us consider if there is a documentation need, or a customer training need, or perhaps it goes back to a product definition challenge. If we go even further back, does it take us to how we sold the product and what we said it could do, and is that adding stress to the code that was not seen before. Did our marketing message change, and are we attracting a different kind of customer?
This is a long and winding path, and it is only one example of how the business is all connected, and of the discoveries we can make when we step back and look at the business holistically. There are similar threads that weave between all of the other areas of the business: from sales to implementation to documentation and training, or from marketing to sales to product. Every part of the business is connected, and it all has to work together.
One of my favorite authors and management consultants is David Marquet. He wrote a great book about his time as a submarine captain —“Turn The Ship Around”. On his ship, he banished the word “they” from the vocabulary. One department could no longer refer to another department with the word “they.” People were forced to use the term “we” instead. Magically, it eliminated all of the finger pointing and reinforced the idea that everyone on the ship was a part of the same team.
This same concept can apply to the interconnectedness of a business. When we look at metrics in departmental silos, we are effectively introducing “they” into our thinking. We look at one group and say “they did XXX,” and look at another group and say “they did YYY.”
If we banished the word “they” and had to use “we”, then our view of metrics and business performance would change radically. Instead of “Engineering had more support tickets,” it becomes “we had more support tickets.” That means we each have to explore why we had more tickets, and all of those leaps and questions I raised above will naturally evolve because we each have to apply our departmental expertise and look at why we have more tickets. It is no longer Engineering’s metric and responsibility, it is our metric and our challenge to get to the root causes of the result. Similarly, it is no longer “Sales oversold,” it is “We oversold” so we need to address it. No longer is it “Product needs to set the priorities,” it becomes “We need to set the priorities,” and if we don’t like them it is our challenge to set new priorities. It isn’t “Sales has a bookings target,” it is “We have a bookings target,” and we have to do everything in our power to meet the target.
Banishing the concept of “they,” and taking a moment to step back and look at the entire connected business is a critical part of driving for success. An energized team will look forward to business performance reviews and board meetings because the process brings the team together. We are all forced to look at the whole business and we all take a step back from the tyranny of the urgent so we can see the arc of where we are headed.