My son Wade and I have been visiting universities during the past month or so as he is just about to enter his senior year of high school. He, like his brother and sister, is a good deal brighter than his father - we are all thankful for their mother's participation in their overall genetic makeup - as evidenced by (1) the rigor of his academic pursuit and (2) his very high performance in it. Something curious has happened during our visits, most of them to out-of-town universities.
The day before we left he shared with me that he thought all of this visitation was a waste of time. He knew where he wanted to go - the hometown school with every course of study and major imaginable and that is just down the road. He loves the sports, the facilities, the reputation and the closeness to home. He was blown away by the visit there. So, to his thinking, why spend the time and money exploring these other opportunities?
Suffice to say that his attitude has changed. A week ago he wanted no part of this exercise and now both of the schools we just visited are on his short list of places to attend. What happened? Why the change of heart? You see, he's had a realization that I hope I can give to you today and that is this: when important decisions are on the line, close personal inspection is key to breaking through our assumptions and out of our comfort zones.
What decisions are you facing today, in your job, your department or your business? If you take a deep look at the way you are thinking through those decisions, one of the key processes you use is the manner in which you will gather information that will help you. How much personal inspection are you taking in? Or are you depending on reports, statuses and a consultant's PowerPoint deck?
I'd like to suggest a better way - personal inspection. Talk to customers. Talk to your associates. Form your own fact-based perceptions based on personal inspection. If you don't have the time to do this - please listen to this - you may not be the best person to be making this decision. If it matters, you need to spend the time. Here are three reasons that your decision to set aside time for personal inspection of the situation is so critical:
1. "It's important." A team of managers and analysts were convening a lazy weekly meeting to provide updates on an effort to clear up errored accounts. 2 inch thick copies of the green bar computer paper - the list of each errored account and the value of the error and the type of transaction were listed there - were piled up neatly in front of each person while the group reviewed a separate status report. The executive over the operation made an impromptu stop into the meeting and pulled up a chair, asking to see a set of the green bar reports and the status report.
2. It affects customers. Rather than working from a status report, the executive I mentioned asked everyone who was working on the items noted "on page 143 of this report". You never saw 12 people flip to page 143 so fast in your life. No one in the room seemed to have yet taken this group of errors on. The executive then reminded everyone that every name on the report represented a real, paying customer whose account was not correct and that every day that went by without action meant we weren't doing our job for them. The status report of their perceived progress wasn't relevant - it was every name of every customer that deserved better.
3. You learn more about your business and its culture. What that executive learned on that particular day wasn't that he had a lot of accounts that needed repair. He learned that the culture of the operation was about status reports, ratios and having a regularly scheduled meeting. His goal in attending the meeting wasn't to speed up everybody's pace, it was to help them see that what mattered were their customers, and that they deserved everyone's very best attention and effort.
Prior to that meeting about 25% of the errors had been cleared in a 2 month time. Within the next 6 weeks, the remaining 75% of the work was completed, with new controls in place to avoid these types of buildups in the future. Leaders get involved and help their teams see the bigger picture and commit to something bigger than the job at hand.
Don't let status reports and PowerPoint presentations simply tell you what's going on - find out why? Your perspective will improve and you be given an opportunity to help others do the same - isn't that what leaders do?
