Be open to criticism
The second way you’re going to answer those three questions is to talk to the critics within your organization and customer base.
“Sometimes the best people to talk to you are your critics, which is no fun to do,” Guertin says. “You go talk to them and listen to what they have to say, and then you walk away feeling like you should kill yourself, but the next day you may have a better idea of how to make things better.”
For example, one of Varian’s customers decided to buy a different product offering, so Guertin called the customer and asked an honest question.
“I said, ‘I know we lost, but will you have dinner with me, and let’s talk about it?’” he says. “’I’m not here to change your mind. I just want to talk about where we went wrong. It’s my job to build a better Varian — can you tell me how to do it?’”
The customer said OK, so the two went to dinner, and Guertin was shocked when it lasted four hours.
“I spent dinner going, ‘OK, so we did this wrong. Good. What else?’” he says. “My job was to say, ‘What else?’ and extract a whole list from him.”
Guertin then wrote a letter to his team about what he had learned so they could fix themselves instead of being mad. It’s important that when you get feedback, you recognize what to listen to, so Guertin goes back to his three questions.
“If those are the goals, then when you get feedback, you sort of match them up against those goals,” he says. “If someone says your service organization screwed up, then you get details about how they screwed up, and then you ask yourself, ‘OK, how is this thing working against us in answering one of those three questions?’”
In addition to taking criticism from your customers, you also need to seek out the internal critics.
“In a lot of companies, the people who tell you all the ways in which something will fail are not welcome,” he says. “But you need to have those people.”
Guertin likes to seek out one particular person to run his ideas by.
“He’s one of those people who can see every possible and conceivable way it can fail,” he says. “If I can walk into his office and discuss an idea and survive the failure discussion, and at the end of it, he’s starting to smile and look interested, I know we’ve got something.”
It’s not easy to welcome criticism, but it’s something you have to train yourself to do. Guertin suggests an exercise that an organizational development person showed him years ago to help set aside your defensiveness. That person told him to take a group of employees into a room and ask them to finish the statement, “My job would be better if _____.” Then write down all the things they say, but you can’t change or argue with anything they say. When you’re all done, you may have 60 or 70 things. Ask people to vote by secret ballot for the top five, and then you’ll see where the consensus is for problems.
“Since you’re the boss, if you don’t react defensively, and if you just write it down, the longer the meeting goes on, the more you’ll get things that are crucially important to them and really are bugging them,” he says.
