I remember way back when I was young and a friend was dating a person who, to be kind about it, ‘had issues.’ We all warned him that this young lady was trouble but he was smitten. Years later, after they had broken up, my friend admitted that we were probably right and she did have ‘issues.’ Since I didn’t have the decency to leave him alone with that statement (and always being the one who pokes people with a stick) I replied, ‘Heck man. That poor girl had more baggage than an American Tourister store.’ He snorted his drink and it wasn’t pretty.
I tell you this story for two reason. The first being that I am almost always right, and the second being we all have baggage that we carry with us. Some of us have a simple carry-on bag while others require a Sherpa and a yak team for assistance. No matter how you slice it though, the luggage is still there.
The same can be said in business. We often carry our baggage with us from job to job and even more so when we are changing positions within the same company. We paid good money for that baggage in blood sweat and tears and we’re just not going to send it to Goodwill without a fight. The fact that it may be blinding us and making us closed to new ideas and approaches seems to be something that came with the luggage as an added bonus.
I worked for a wireless phone company in a past life. It doesn’t matter which one, it’s like the DMV. You get the point. We had some young guns and some old codgers working there and for the most part we all got along as well as phone company employees could. We had our territorial disputes and departmental quarrels but since the vast majority of us were customer focused it kept our eyes on what was important. There were of course those odd occasions when things went terribly wrong.
Being the early days of wireless we had little competition. Many of our senior managers had come from the landline side of the business, which peppered our leadership with people who had spent entire careers with a carrier in a virtual monopoly in their respective markets. If you didn’t like how Landline Company A was treating you in those days your choice was to either resort to smoke signals for communications or just take the abuse and pay your bill. But wireless was a different world. Judge Green (you don’t remember Judge Green? That’s what the Internet and Wikipedia are for) had made sure to fix that problem with his divestiture decree and we had, at a minimum, a duopoly (that means 2 choices for those of you not familiar with the term). Now if you didn’t like Wireless Carrier A you could go to Wireless Carrier B. Not much choice but it was still a choice. But this concept didn’t sit well with some folks and others just plain ignored it.
Change? What’s There to Like About Change?!
We had a manager that worked in our Engineering department that had been with the company since Alexander Graham Bell was a boy (I’m only slightly exaggerating on this one, trust me). Before joining the company he had spent a prior career in the military. To say he was set in his ways would be an insult to the curmudgeons of the world. Anyway, this guy, we’ll call him Mr. Curmudgeon to simplify things, did not like change and was not afraid to voice his opinion about it. There was no way anybody was going to tell him to do anything different regardless of the reasoning or consequences.
We required fundamental business changes to prepare for the upcoming introduction of at least two more competitors in our market. We needed to make sure we had the best network performance available so our customers would have no reason to leave headed for one of the new upstarts. The problem was that Mr. Curmudgeon was a member of the Network Engineering staff and his assessment of how the network performed was the only opinion he chose to listen to.
But here is the problem with that – you can’t be considered the best at anything if you are the only one who thinks you are. Without some kind of independent outside verification it can never be a true measure.
We are Not Always What we Believe
We had just been ranked highest in customer satisfaction by a well known survey firm for the third year in a row and some of us were pretty full of ourselves. During a strategy planning meeting one person actually bragged about how great we were and sited the survey results as his proof. Never at a loss for a sarcastic comment, I chimed in that it wasn’t so much that our customer’s loved us, they just hated our lone competitor more. The room was eerily silent. Was it something I said?
What followed was a prolonged discussion about how we could stay in that enviable #1 position going forward. We knew from verbatim statements captured from survey participants that they were generally happy but there were serious concerns about coverage and call quality in four specific geographic areas. This was a simple problem to fix since it had been verified by literally hundreds of survey respondents who could only be considered unbiased observers. Research results from an army of testers and we didn’t pay a dime for any of it. How cool is that? This was however taken by one individual in the room as a personal insult. I bet you can’t guess who?
Mr. Curmudgeon blurted out that according to his network statistics, these customers were wrong. All of them. Uh, ok? Obviously they had an axe to grind. They rated us better than our competition, provided valuable feedback about where we were doing well and where we could improve and they were all wrong? Which part were they wrong about? If we assume they are too stupid to assess the areas where we need improvement it only stands to reason that we should wholly dismiss their positive feedback as well. Fair is fair.
Mr. Curmudgeon was guilty of carrying his own baggage into the room on a furniture dolly. You could not call his baby ugly and by stating that we had some areas to improve on our customers were calling Mr. Curmudgeon’s network (AKA his baby) ugly. How dare they!
How many times do we collect input (good or bad) with a wary eye? Do we first consider who is communicating the information to us and use that as our frame of reference for whether we accept it or not? Do we simply dismiss things we don’t want to hear because these thoughts don’t agree with our view? Is your baby so ugly it should be called a monkey and given a banana? How will you know if you don’t leave your baggage at the door? It may be easier said than done but it is a must for any successful business. Not to mention your mobile projects!
Don’t be like Mr. Curmudgeon. Life is way too short to take everything so personally.
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Tags: Brian Philbin, Business Proc, Field Servic, Mobile Futures Today
