From executive obsession to customer obsession

Have you ever considered why the organization in which you work may have flaws precisely in those areas that are declared to be the most important?

In this article, I want to share a possible answer and two questions that will allow you to detect key things that you might not have realized that you, your team or your company need in order to strengthen leadership.

Every time we reach the end of the year, millions of people become aware of what we've done (or haven't done!) over the past twelve months. So, the coming year presents a fresh opportunity to get a little closer to that person we really want to be. Hence new year’s resolutions.

But even if we talk about it in a public speech, jot down our intentions in a notebook, paint it on the bathroom mirror or immortalize them in a tattoo, those declarations of what we want to be and start to do, also reveal what we still haven't managed to do or to become.

And doesn't this also happen when we declare in our companies what is most important for us in a mission statement, or we tell the world what our values are through the website, HR portal or that poster that is now hanging in your office hallway?

Of course, there is also the possibility that your company has a high level of coherence with what it declares - maybe it has been working for some time on embodying those values and that mission, but often these are relatively new initiatives, statements made to remind us what we lack and what we aspire to become.

The risk is confusing talking about that value with being and living that value. Because it's easy to draw the quick conclusion that if we talk a lot about those values, it must be because we're already excellent at living by those values. What’s more, it might appear very negative if someone were to focus on and point out where the organization is not living out those values.

However, a mission or values statement is useful when we use it to stop “automatic mode” and remind ourselves what is most important. When we use it to measure the gap between what we are today and what we want to be tomorrow, and to organize how we are going to develop those skills that we lack.

When Kennedy declared the mission to land a man on the moon by the end of that decade, it was aspirational. Precisely a goal that had not yet been achieved. That is the nature of mission statements.

For example, in a company like Microsoft where we talk about learning, empowering and experimenting -because that is the company we dream of being- we can easily begin to have the feeling that in talking about it we are already busy being apprentices, empowerers and experimenters. That can produce a reassuring effect when previously we could only see a gap that was hurting us. If we are not careful, it could become an anesthetic that makes us less sensitive to the need to learn and change.

And, with a strategy like this, not only would it be very unusual for us to become what we are dreaming of, but in not focusing ourselves on improving what we are lacking today, we’ll probably end up becoming good examples of the exact opposite, without even realizing it!

To avoid falling into this illusion of coherence we ask two questions that can turn your mission and your values into training tools.

First Question: Am I living this value in this decision?

By converting the mission and values into questions you can now evaluate whether you are on the chosen course. At Microsoft for example, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In order to avoid the anesthetic effect, let's try to turn it into a question: Am I empowering people to achieve more in each of my decisions? And we can also apply it to: In my decisions am I being a Learn-It-All? Or, when deciding something, am I encouraging myself to live in Experiment Mode?

Second Question: If we talk so much about this value, to what extent could we have anesthetized ourselves to living it and be doing the exact opposite?

For example, we carried out the test of converting the Customer Obsession value into a question: Am I making customers a priority in my decision-making? And we discovered that perhaps not always.

But we really saw clearly when we asked the second question: If we talk so much about Customer Obsession, what would be the opposite?

We discovered that the opposite could be Executive Obsession. That is, being obsessed with doing something that pleases our boss instead of satisfying the customer.

In the case of my team -University Recruiting- our "internal" customers (or perhaps a more appropriate name is partners) are all the hiring managers across the different Microsoft teams who receive our candidates and our "external" customers (or perhaps a better name is also partners! Partomers?) are the actual University graduates and students we are inviting to join Microsoft.

When we started redesigning the summer internship program we had to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: Why are we seeking the approval from our superiors instead of consulting with the actual students who, in the end, are going to experience the internship?

Thanks to the awareness that these questions provoked, today we have already invited future interns and former interns to participate in our University Recruiting radio show. We consulted with them on the upcoming summer activity changes and we are planning to involve them in the improvement of all aspects of our recruiting processes.

In fact, we believe that to truly be able to claim Customer Obsession, we should at minimum include a former intern in all our projects.

As a result of asking ourselves these powerful questions, we are even transforming the T-shirt swag we will give the receiving intern managers into a T-shirt "tool" that reminds them to often ask themselves "Am I empowering my summer intern to become the best possible version of themselves?"

Now our job is to continue using our stated mission as a magnifying glass that allows us to discover new gaps. The criteria we use to make the most important decisions, investments and actions will ultimately be what makes the difference at the end of this year.

Written by Diego Rejtman and Guillermo Echevarria