We often think of the various functional areas of our business as siloes. Sales is separate from Engineering, which is separate from Customer Success and Finance. We recognize the through thread that connects some of the functions, like sales and marketing, but we still think of them as distinct efforts with independent metrics. When a functional area has ‘issues,’ we consider it their challenge to overcome: Sales missed its bookings target, or engineering had too many bugs, or accounting missed its collections target. The truth is that it is all connected.
One of my favorite business authors, David Marquet, talks about the power of banning the word ‘they’ from our vocabulary. ‘They’ is a divisive word. It separates ‘us’ from ‘them,’ and gives permission to place blame instead of share responsibility. When we banish the word ‘they’ and replace it with ‘we’, our view of metrics and business performance changes radically.
Let’s look at an example where we discover a spike in support tickets being passed to Engineering. The siloed response is that ‘They - Engineering’ need to work harder and increase their solve rate. It is Engineering’s metric, so it is their problem to resolve. Maybe ‘they’ need to assign more resources to drive down the volume.
Think about how the response changes if we say ‘We’ have more support tickets being passed to Engineering. It means every part of the company has to explore how ‘we’ are going to address the issue. We start to ask questions: Are we seeing more support tickets as a result of recent product enhancements? Did we specify a confusing enhancement? Do we have a coding problem or do we have a QA problem? Do the tickets reflect issues in old code that was never stressed, and is our uptick a result of a change in our implementation methodology? How many of the tickets were ultimately 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? Do we need more tools to better equip support? Does that take us to a documentation need, or a training need, or perhaps it goes back to a product definition issue that led to a confusing user experience? If we go even further back, does it take us to how we sold the product and what we said it could do? Was our marketing attracting customers with unusual use cases? Did we over-sell?
When we change the ownership of the problem from ‘They - Engineering’ to ‘We,’ all of these leaps and questions naturally evolve. It is no longer Engineering’s metric and responsibility, it is our metric and our challenge to get to the root of it. It becomes a collaborative effort instead of a siloed effort.
A similar example is “‘Sales’ missed its bookings target.” Instead, if we frame the issue as “‘We’ missed our bookings target,” then not only do we look at Sales activities, we go further and look at the product/market fit and our feature set. We look at Marketing and lead quality, and we look at “Customer Success” and our reputation in the market, and, yes, ultimately we look at strategy and addressable market opportunity. When we banish the word ‘they’ and use ‘we’ instead, our perspective on performance changes. It brings us together and forces us to connect the dots and recognize the interconnectedness of the entire business.
It may not feel natural at first, but give it a try. Ban the word ‘they’ from your corporate vocabulary. Invluding when team members discuss customer issues. Instead of addressing customer problems as ‘they’ broke something, try substituting ‘we.’ Instead of ‘they’ broke the system, try ‘we’ broke the system. It may be unnatural, but it forces us to step into the customer’s shoes and recognize that we are responsible for their success, so we are a part of any issues they have. It helps to close the gap between vendor and customer, and it creates customer advocacy internally.
The same we/they thinking translates into the CEO/board dynamic. Board members are separate from daily operations, so it is easy to look at the business and speak of management as ‘they.’ After all, ‘they’ are the ones running the business. However, when board members shift to using ‘we,’ it creates a more collaborative environment. In my early days as a CEO, when there was a problem, my initial instinct was to go to the board thinking it was solely management’s problem. It felt a lot like grade school, going to the principal’s office to confess to our screw up. However, when a board member responded with “what are ‘we’ doing about it,” instead of “what are ‘you’ doing about it,” it was disarming. The tone went from an arms-length posture to a collaborative footing. It is a lesson learned as a CEO that I now practice as a board member. Board members and management have distinct roles to play, but using ‘we’ closes the gap. We are all professionals aiming for the same positive outcomes. ‘We’ can make it a collaboration.