What do you think we should want?
C-level leaders aren’t there because they know everything. They’re not there because they’re good at getting people to do the work. They’re there because they’re very good at finding the right people to help them make the right decisions.
More and more often, as my work involves advising leaders, when I ask them what they want, I will hear the response,
“What do you think we should want?” This is a very important question and one that I love to hear.
Here’s why.
It provides me with a blank page. A drawing board on which to get innovative. To call upon my experience in a broad range of industries, think about best practices and create something really cool for my client, their staff and their customers. And I don’t think that my client should know what they want by default. After all, with the demands of running the business-as-usual aspects of their organisation, they often don’t have the time to keep themselves abreast of what is going on in their industry. Some might know and that’s always refreshing and nice to work with. But many, simply don’t know what they don’t know.
Of course, I could never advise a client what they should want, unless I have all the information I need to advise them. That means understanding their business top down and bottom up. That means digging deep into the various business functions and understanding the people, the processes and the technologies. Taking a look at independent information that tells me what customers really think about the organisation’s products, services and customer support. Sitting with contact centre agents and listening to calls, watching how systems are used. Shadowing operational managers to understand how front-office and back-office works and how supporting and cross-cutting business functions make the whole thing run. An emphasis on staff experience, customer experience and finance is so important and immersing myself into the culture of the business is foundational.
Add to that understanding, a deep dive into the client organisation’s industry sector (or sub-sector) and the vertical market that the sector belongs to. The macro market factors in which the client exists and what their peers and competitors are doing and how they measure their success vs. how the client measures theirs.
This level of information gathering and insight doesn’t always have to be long-winded or disruptive. Very often, clients already have a lot of this information - it resides in different parts of the business in different (often disconnected) systems or in people’s heads or hard copy documentation. It usually hasn’t been gathered into a single source of truth for the various functions of the business. When we create that consolidated source of truth and understand the as-is, we can create the to-be based on the client’s appetite for changing to become a specific player in their sector. Some prefer to be industry followers. That’s what works best for their business. Others want to be leaders and differentiate themselves from the crowd - we can do that too.
After all of the information is gathered, it’s then down to innovation. Coming up with something new after analysing that information is the secret sauce - it’s hard to define how that is done. Lots of experience in different sectors helps, but it’s more than that.
All of these insights are essential to be able to answer that question; “What do you think we should want?”
To become a true business partner and advisor to the client, I should be able to answer that question and be able to tell them why.
That’s thought leadership and we are very good at it.