Feeling Clueless?
When we know someone is struggling the right thing to do is help them. At work, the most clueless person on the team surely needs extra attention. What if the Most Clueless Person (MCP) is you?
As you deliver results, your business will grow. You’ll hire people, you’ll scale. But the bigger your team gets, the further you get from your customers. The distance makes you clueless about their needs. As a leader, you become the MCP. This gets tricky because you hold the most control over the decision-making process. Decisions made far from the customer are a dangerous trap for organizations trying to become more customer-centric.
The fix is to change how your organization makes decisions. You can start by decentralizing decision making. If a judgement call can be undone, it is a decision you, as the MCP, should not make. Ideally, the person closest to the customer should make the call. If a decision is irreversible, there’s no coming back, you may need to be involved, and great care and resource should be spent considering your options and the trade-offs of the options on the table.
While it can be difficult to know if a decision is reversible or not, a few rules of thumb can help. If you spent the resources to execute this decision a hundred times over, and they all failed, would your business be at risk? If not, it is reversible. It has a low opportunity cost.
Now, think about the external stakeholders that might be involved. Such as your customers, investors or partners. Imagine they’re sitting in an amphitheatre waiting to hear you present the ‘big deliverable’ that results from this decision. You walk in, take the stage, and present the finished product. If things don’t go as you expect, and it’s a disaster, can you turn around and walk back through that door? Can you undo what you built? If so, the decision has limited scope.
Organizational change is never easy. As a first step, print up these diagrams and share them with your team. Own that you’re the MCP. Share your plan with your colleagues and empower them to make more decisions. If you aren’t having 1:1s, start and check-in to see how you’re going.
You may be clueless, but you can still be customer-centric.
Further Reading
Jeff Bezos on Decision Making (link)
Richard Branson on Two-way door decisions (link)