Keep Your Focus Across the Silos

The ability of leaders to motivate an organization to think collectively about its purpose and customer-centric focus is critical to your work.

Segmenting the operation into the silos may seem a manageable way to a top executive, but it’s not the way the customer sees the world.

Two Symptoms of a Silo Driven Customer Experience

Look for these two symptoms in your organization to decide if you have a motivation challenge around the customer thing:

1. Not tracking customer metrics
It’s not at the top of executive’s talk track to ask about customers lost or saved, and the reasons why.

2. Lack clarity of purpose of what you will achieve for customers
Everyone’s doing his or her own thing. If you walk through the company and ask ten different people what the company is supposed to mean to customers, you’ll get ten different answers.  Different parts of a company have different answers for what they are trying to accomplish with their customers.

• How many times does “who is our customer?” become open to debate?
• How can a company expect to be in sync under these conditions?

Work Cross-Functionally & Collaborate

One of the hardest skills is for the company to learn to work cross-functionally. The silos need to collaborate to ensure that the handoffs across the organization are executed for optimum customer interactions. This will seem to slow people down. They will feel frustrated that they can’t own the entire job as they did in the past.

As a leader, you’ll need to ask the questions constantly about whether people are engaging in this important collaboration.

• Ask regularly about the customer touch points that are affected and question if they were all thought through.
• Find ways to motivate teams across the organization to pull in the same direction.

You’ll need to think about the handoffs they affect, not just the function they perform. This will challenge even the way you meet with the leaders of the functional areas.

Take Action:
Track Customer Metrics: Five Answers Every CEO Should Want to Know
Decide with Clarity of Purpose