Use what you hear
If you’ve put your front-line people in a position where they can reach upward in the organization with ideas and information, you need to be able to take what they’re telling you and use it to better the company. Otherwise, you’re sending a negative message to your employees about the effect their work is having on the company’s overall mission.
Polk uses the engagement of his customer-level employees as an opportunity to gain a realistic picture of where his company’s customers are headed and what their needs will be in the foreseeable future, which allows he and his leadership team to begin sketching a strategic plan for the coming years.
“The first part is starting with that very open and realistic assessment of what the current reality is,” Polk says. “What your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. You take an environmental scan of where your customers are growing and where they see the most value in the products that you deliver.
“We want to know where we can create efficiencies to help our customers and ourselves, then try to project that into the future. The real challenge is creating a living plan out of it, something that isn’t going to sit on the shelf.”
A living plan has to have some degree of flexibility. If you are going to place an emphasis on listening to customers and reacting to their needs, you can’t formulate a market strategy that is so cumbersome or rigid, you can’t react to an unexpected change.
It’s a delicate balance to stay on your core competencies but remain willing and able to pounce on an opportunity that allows you to employ those competencies in a new way. Polk says you can’t deviate from your mission as a company, but your products, services and areas of focus have to exist in a fluid environment.
“You have to start with a recognition that what you are putting out there in the market is really about how you want to conduct the business,” he says. “There are focus areas that are going to have to change, but it’s understanding the types of services you want to be at, the types of products you want to be building around in each environment. You have to communicate the fact that those areas are flexible, create an understanding with everybody in the company. That is probably the most important thing.”
To understand when you need to take advantage of an opportunity or forge a new direction, you need to be able to measure your progress against your goals. That means you need process checkpoints and a willingness to allow your team to assess where you are in relation to your goals.
“You really need to be able to understand what your checkpoints are along the way in any process or product or in any initiative that you are outlining,” Polk says. “It really needs to be a candid self-assessment of what is the reality that your customers are dealing with, the reality of how you’re delivering on expectations, then making adjustments to it.
“Sometimes you need more effort, and sometimes conditions dictate that you stop doing what you’re doing — even if it’s something that you had been committed to. The right answer is ultimately to be open and honest about the reality you’re facing.”
