I was just recently consulting to a company where we caught a very instructive error.
We have a new individual at the head of one department. He is pretty savvy about customer record management and the Internet but handling the administrative aspects of these things is not the highest and best use of his time. Consequently, he brought in a fellow he had worked with elsewhere who has good depth in this level of execution. The new fellow, a fine person and quite talented, was suddenly up to his eyeballs in the customer database and finding all kinds of incomplete records. Prior to my consulting visit, he had literally spent weeks trying to get his arms around it and clean it up so that his department would have a sound basis for marketing, especially electronic marketing.
I have the advantage (and the privilege) of a long-term relationship with this company. My specialty is in leadership development, culture and strategic development and execution. I’m by no means an Internet or Customer Record Management expert. However, I like to get to know all the people in my client organizations where size allows it. So I sat down and visited with this gentleman who has been spending the last several weeks in front of computer tunneling his way into customer data. In the course of things, I asked him if he had discussed any of his findings with two other managers in the organization both of whom, to my knowledge, are also deeply involved with customer data, even though they are in different departments. He blinked like someone who had just been awakened at 3 AM and said, “Well, no.” I immediately called in the two other fellows and in short order, it was clear that the new man’s efforts were redundant and unnecessary. This was no cause for upset or blame. It is actually a common error when new people are brought into a situation and given such a powerful sense of urgency about accomplishing certain tasks that they don’t have time to really get to know all the other key players in the organization and acquire a good sense of what their responsibilities are.
So very quickly, everyone now knew that we already had a clean customer data base available to all departments for their various marketing needs. We also all knew that we had an outside vendor whose software was cleaning our database literally on a daily basis. This vendor was contracted by a highly tenured department head but the information hadn’t yet been shared with the new men.
The organization is now poised to move ahead in short order with a series of electronic marketing campaigns. And guess what? Now, when these campaigns are designed and scheduled, everyone from all departments that market will be in the room together. There won’t be a hair of distance between any of them. They’ll avoid bombarding clients with too much information, developing campaigns that conflict with each other and they’ll make sure everyone in the organization all the way to the ends of the front line will know what’s going on.
Dr. Deming, my beloved mentor, was urging organizational leaders sixty years ago to make sure strategy was a collaborative effort and toward that end, to get all the right people in the room—from design engineers to sales people, from vendors who will play an important role in a given process to the people on the line who turn wrenches or take customer calls. It’s as necessary and desirable today as it was then, but not just when high level strategic decisions are being made. Everyone who touches a process or policy should be in the room together on a periodic basis to make sure we get the most informed decisions and they’re executed in the most efficient manner; one key part of efficiency being that all who should know do know. This is one of the many reasons I regularly counsel my clients to “err on the side of over-communicating.”
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