Line of sight - why the search for quality never ends.

In an earlier article I had a good moan ... sorry, provided some constructive feedback ... about what I experienced as service failure from companies both large and small. The failures started me thinking about causes and root causes and have led to this article on communication and line of sight.

Leaders rarely have an argument against providing a product or service that customers want to buy. Why then do we still have product failures and services that fail to meet our expectation? I'll bet the Directors of the companies concerned would be horrified to learn of their customer's reaction to services provide in the name of their company and, in best Net Promoter Score tradition, they have an ex-customer Detractor running round prepared to go out of their way to tell others what poor service they received and do anything to warn friends and family to not spend their hard-earned money with these companies.

How did we get to this point? Most organizations build their strategies around identifying and satisfying customer requirements and all the pronouncements for the Board in terms of Policy and Vision, Mission and Values will support that approach. But deployment of this policy is ineffective. As the message comes down from the summit it is filtered and altered in a tortuous organizational form of the children's game of Chinese whispers or the more politically acceptable US version, telephone. Standing at the top of the mountain our CEO's Vision is clear, the line of sight to the objective on the horizon is direct. For employees standing from their viewpoint in the organization's foothills, however, the path is less clear, our horizon is much closer, the path less straightforward, there are forks in the road and the surface we travel on is variable and likely to halt our progress. Our travelling companions may be similarly confused and their understanding of the objective not the same as ours.

The challenge for the Board remains how to develop a policy for (in this case) customer satisfaction and ensure it is robust enough to survive the journey down the mountain to those who actually deliver those products and services to customers. Their challenge is how to deal with organizational culture including management layers whose experience and status relies on their 'getting the job done' including filtering messages going up and down the chain to a point where the message in either direction is lost. These aren't bad people, they are used to pragmatic approaches and, without having bought into the vision, know exactly what is required to show the vision has made it through ... even if it hasn't.

How does line of sight give us a way forward? Back to our example: our visionary leader has a mental picture of how they see the organization in the long term, satisfied customer repeatedly returning to buy our products and services and recommending us to anyone who will listen. For the leader to get that vision into the heads of the frontline employee there are two main options:

• The MD / CEO can work on developing telepathy skills to allow them to directly transfer the vision from their mind simultaneously to all the individuals in the organization, or,
• They could think more practically, considering how they will get their vision across to employees and put a plan together to do this, considering:
• Forks in the road
• How to even out lumps and bumps on the travelling surface
• How to ensure people have an accurate route plan for how to get to the objective.
• How to ensure communications to the travellers (and especially those responsible for driving) are maintained throughout the journey: updating progress, time to destination; current heading and any patches of rough weather / traffic along the away – much like a friendly and persistent satnav voice confirming they are on track with the occasional need to ‘make a U turn when possible.’

Continuing the analogy, it will be relatively easy for our MD to monitor journey progress if they are on the same vehicle, they have direct feedback of distance travelled and current speed. They experience the hold ups personally, any wrong turnings (and can issue immediate instructions to return to the plan) and, probably most importantly, can witness driving standards of their appointed leaders.

If they aren’t on the same vehicle as their employees, they are reliant on a chain of command to relay progress information to them and take any requirements for course correction back to their designated drivers. Individual traits and behaviours now come into play as does the bigger picture of organizational culture.

Even if I support the overall plan, if I know that any feedback of journey problems will lead to hassle from my direct boss or the MD, I may choose to change the message, particularly if:

·        I believe the risk of being found out is low

·        I’m confident (justified or not) in getting back on track

·        There is a long time between reporting and true results being apparent

·        There is a chance of plausible deniability.

In a pyramid reporting structure with layers between information gathering and my MD each layer has that same decision process and the temptation to massage the figures increases if the manager believes they can recover the position or there may be something unforeseen in the near future that takes the MD’s attention off the plan, the plan is changed or even the leadership team may change.

The perception is that senior leaders don’t want bad news and this leads to a culture of massaging figures and gaming targets. There are many examples out there such as rogue trader, Nick Leeson, the 2008 financial crash, gaming targets in the NHS, and, most recently cheating in exams at academy trusts, not by the students but by the teachers!

What, then, is the answer? A good understanding of the organization and its culture is vital to have a good picture of what problems need to be managed. To do this our MD / CEO needs to descend from their office in the organization’s summit and spend some time talking to the people in the foothills. This doesn’t have to be a ‘back to the floor’ intervention but the person who will be accountable for the strategy needs to understand how those people who will have to deliver understand the direction and intent. Secondly the senior team needs to ensure the plan is aligned with the organization’s culture and is workable. The communications processes need to be examined and tested to ensure messages can be transmitted unchanged up and down the organization.

Unless the plan is comprehensive the end result will probably be as successful as any efforts at telepathy, mentioned earlier.