Initiate bottoms-up updates
First, Dameris talked to everyone. If the end goal is to fit input together to come up with the best decision, the first step is obviously collecting all of the pieces.
It’s a collaborative process for Dameris, who stays connected with multiple touch points at various intervals.
“Try not to be insulated, and at the end of the day, try to formulate an opinion that’s based on many views,” he says.
His management team meets telephonically at least bimonthly, and each manager meets with his or her divisions weekly. But in between, the management team is spending as much time as possible in front of customers.
The goal is to find out how your customers’ industries are evolving and, as a result, what they’ll need from you both now and in the future. That requires understanding general marketplace trends and how individual customers will react to those.
“We don’t want to be Kodak film where, because you haven’t innovated, you’re just intermediated by digital photography. That is something that we have to think about every day,” Dameris says. “In 1999, I could have sold all the COBOL programmers that I could find to help with Year 2K remediation. But after Dec. 31, 1999, there wasn’t as big a need. So if I just focused on that skill set, I would be in bad shape and I’d have an obsolete skill set inventory.
“So we constantly have to think in terms of what’s early-stage adoption, what’s late-stage adoption and where our industries are going.”
While you’re looking at oncoming changes through long-term lenses, part of your job is sharing those glasses with the rest of your staff.
So when Dameris meets with employees for quarterly updates — both positive and negative trends in their operations and end markets — the sharing goes both ways. Not only does he recap what he’s seeing, he also asks employees what they’ve been hearing from customers.
“We ask the field, because they’re the ones on the front line; we have to feel for their input,” he says. “So whether it’s how we develop a new line of business to how we do better training or communications, that comes as much from the field as it does from corporate. We’re not a complete top-down organization.”
Dameris also spurs feedback with idea submission competitions in certain areas, from branding to controlling overhead without destroying service. He hopes those kinds of pushes will keep feedback constantly bubbling up through managers.
“We typically do bottoms up,” Dameris says. “We try to keep our leaders as informed and as exposed to the customer, to the industry, to thought leaders as possible so that they’re in a better position to develop meaningful and informative opinions for us to use.”