Avoid groupthink
In evaluating the faucet market, Werner wanted to get a sense of what the others did well or didn’t do well and how he might be able to capitalize on it. He also wanted to steer them away from just buying in to his ideas.
“You hear what you want to hear and you interpret things in a way that is consistent with your value set and what you’re looking for and that’s how you end up with groupthink,” Werner says.
His solution to avoiding this problem was to have his employees take on the roles of competitors and the customers that those competitors were trying to sell to.
“Somebody might pretend they are Delta and somebody might pretend they’re Moen,” Werner says. “They try to look at their strengths and weaknesses. Then we also try to have people who represent the customer, the B2B customer and the end-unit customer. We try to identify what’s most important to them. A lot of this is initially traditional market research. The difference between us and others is that we do it internally.
“We do it ourselves. If we need specific knowledge, we’ll go on the outside and somebody will help us. But we try to do it ourselves because we want to have our people all be innovative and think innovatively. If you just rely on an outside consultant, they’ll hand you a beautiful report, but then what will you do with it? If your people help create it, then they really believe in it and it means something. We want our people to think strategically, not just have somebody hand it to them on a platter.”
When you get people to look at something from a different viewpoint, such as through taking on the role of a competitor, you open their own eyes and get them to take ownership. You also keep them from looking at things through your eyes.
“What I try to do is get people to not lock in too early to any one idea because human nature is you’ll kind of grab a hold of something and you own it and it’s yours and you don’t want to change,” Werner says. “People become change-resistant. So I try to get people to hold off committing until we’ve really been through all the ideas.”
Getting people to be willing to change their viewpoint is a critical component to reaching a thoroughly researched and conclusive decision.
“A lot of times with a leader, what will happen is the subordinates worry about what the leader would do and they end up paralyzing themselves,” Werner says. “What you have to be willing to do is not micromanage your people. Let them make mistakes. If they’re going to make a tragic mistake, you’ll save them. But there are very few people who die day in and day out in business. Most things are recoverable.”
