If you’ve ever been a ‘customer’ and received a quote or proposal from a supplier, you’ve probably experienced one of the major paradoxes in business – customers are the lifeblood of any organization, but when it comes time to provide a solution, many companies talk about themselves and not their customers. Very few executives wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “We’re going to be completely self-obsessed and forget about our customers today!”, but self-interest is a slippery slope and when a company becomes more focused on what they want to sell rather than the problems they exist to solve their competitive advantage and profitability slips away.
Among the mountain of research supporting customer-centricity, Deloitte Insights found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies not focused on the customer, and the Temkin Group found that companies earning $1 billion annually can expect to earn an additional $700 million within three years of investing in customer experience. If it’s so obvious, then why is it so hard? To survive and thrive in a world where customer expectations continually change, businesses need to be exceptional at constantly identifying problems their customers face.
Sir Richard Branson famously said; “To launch a business means successfully solving problems”, and Jim Collins developed the ‘Hedgehog Concept’ based on the essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox”. Collins argued that some businesses are ‘foxes,’ which pursue multiple interests simultaneously, thereby diluting the intensity applied to any singular problem. ‘Hedgehog’ businesses, however, are crystal clear on the problem they exist to solve and have a laser-like focus on understanding it and solving it better than anyone else. This hyper-focus requires a large group of people to be interested in the problem and passionately committed to putting intense effort into solving it - a huge challenge for any reasonably sized organization.
While identifying the big problem a business exists to solve is critical to establishing a clear vision and purpose for the organization, individuals and teams need to identify and solve lots of smaller problems continuously to enable this vision. In an ideal world, people would automatically identify problems, but in the real world, people may simply have no interest in identifying a problem, or they’re aware of it, but it goes into the bucket of “someone else’s problem”.
This creates a risk in business as it’s rarely a personal problem people are solving. Business is essentially monetized problem-solving, with leaders and their teams paid to solve someone else’s problems – those of customers, colleagues, the community, or society at large. Generally, the better they are at identifying and solving the problem, the better the commercial outcomes. This presents the first immediate challenge – getting lots of people interested in someone else’s problem.
Getting people interested in other people’s problems
A team that is interested in the problem will be curious about how the problem occurs – investigating what parts are the actual problem and what is noise. Success in this endeavour relies on the interest level of individuals and teams. However, in large commercial enterprises, many problems exist, and many people, yet not all people, can recognize all problems. And not all problems are interesting enough for people to want to solve them. This means there must be motivation for people to want to identify the problem before they will even apply effort to it.
Three key psychosocial risk factors - anxiety, conformity, and ambiguity - significantly impair interest. If people are anxious, they are primarily focused on their anxiety and interested in their own problems rather than the problem they should be solving for others. Conformity limits people’s ability to identify the problem, as they will say they are interested in the problem, yet they’re not really interested at all. People may also insist something is a problem when it isn’t, sending the business in the wrong direction, solving the wrong problem. Finally, ambiguity due to poor communication makes it difficult to know what problems to look for and who is interested in the problems and who is not, so you run the risk of the wrong people looking for the wrong problems. All of this amounts to a waste of time, money, resources and a ton of missed opportunities.
Getting people putting intense effort into identifying problems
The second step in identifying the problem is the intensity of effort. It takes energy, both personally and professionally, to identify the contributing factors and root causes of the problem. If individuals and teams apply their effort to this by asking questions, examining data, and using logic while listening to the answers, then the cause and effect of the problem can be accurately identified. This requires people to have the belief and desire to thoroughly unpack the elements of the problem, rather than simply glossing over them or misidentifying problematic parts. Getting this wrong leads to extra time, money, and resources being directed to solving the problem, or the problem never being effectively solved.
Stimulation, anxiety, and conformity are critical risks to the intensity of effort. When people are overstimulated and have too much energy, they struggle to focus on the right tasks. They also miss or misidentify information as they are rushing to just get things done, so they can relax. Conversely, when under-stimulated, they become bored, distracted, and unable to focus on the task. They are likely to procrastinate or focus on other problems which they find more stimulating. Anxiety is another significant risk as people excessively worry and focus on their own problems rather than putting intense focus on solving someone else’s problem.
Finally, conformity means people won’t voice their concerns and will say they are committed to putting in the effort to identify the problem, but when push comes to shove, they won’t. This impacts not only one problem, but it’s likely this person could have been utilised on another project, identifying and solving a different problem, one they genuinely wanted to work on. This is where businesses underestimate the impact of psychosocial risk factors like anxiety, the huge hidden cost on time and resources, and the missed opportunities.
How leaders ensure their team is less foxy and more focused
If businesses are a problem-solving machine, then leaders need to recognize their critical role as the principal mechanic who keeps the machine humming with minimal friction and frustration for their teams, customers, and other stakeholders. A crucial part of this is ensuring they have a team of ‘hedgehogs’ who are focused on the right problems, rather than foxes distracted by their own problems. Leaders must constantly cascade and communicate the purpose, vision, and strategy of the organization and connect this to people’s individual tasks and performance measures.
A simple and fundamental shift is to empower everyone in the organization to be a ‘Chief Problem Solver’, continuously looking for better ways of working and new ways of helping the customers. Customer-facing teams like sales and customer service need to be armed with the right diagnostic tools and skills to maintain an intense interest and focus on customer problems, not just their products and profits. Internal operations and support teams must have the mindset and skillset to identify better ways of working that supports better customer or stakeholder experiences.
One strategy to enable and support these Chief Problem Solvers is the ‘customer chair’ concept popularized by Jeff Bezos at Amazon – every meeting room has an empty chair reserved for the customer. Every team member in every meeting has a duty to anchor the conversation back to the empty chair and the person whose problems they are there to solve – the customer. The pleasant by-product of all these strategies will always be more empowered employees, satisfied customers, and a better bottom line.
An effective leader with the right personality will lower anxiety by checking how the team is functioning in their roles as Chief Problem Solvers - what they’re focused on, what they’re distracted by - and keep the team interested in the problems they’re meant to solve. Leaders who intentionally or unintentionally create excessive worry in the team will slow this process down or create more problems than they solve. To gain a genuine competitive advantage in problem-solving, organizations must measure how capable their leaders are of unlocking the problem-solving potential of their people.
To find out more and measure the problem-solving potential of your leaders and their impact on the psychosocial safety of their teams, check out the science behind The GreyScale Leadership Assessment tool and find helpful resources at http://tgsleadership.com
