Effective leadership can make or break your business. Are you an effective leader?
A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled “Are You an Effective Leader and Why You Should Care” Since that post, one of my Mastermind groups discussed each of the 23 aspects of leadership outlined in this post. This discussion revealed some very valuable nuggets of information! I took a lot of notes during these discussions and the key points I captured are shown below:
In a 2005 Bain and Company survey of 362 companies, a huge gap was identified between what customers experience versus what companies thought they were delivering.
The gap was not just huge, it was staggering! Only 8% of customers in this survey described their service experience as “superior” while 80% of the companies described the service they provide as “superior.”
Tom Peters calls this the 8/80 chasm!
I have experienced this 8/80 chasm on a few engineering projects over the years.
An engineering contract typically has a ton of detail built into it. Because of this, it is really easy to fall into the trap of “working to fulfill the contract” instead of working to understand exactly what the customer needs before you are too far down the design road to make adjustments.
When a project manager falls into this trap of managing to the contract, it is inevitable that they will encounter a customer who is not happy with the finished product. Usually, when this happens, the project is so far down the design path that the effort to get realigned with the customer’s expectations is extremely painful for both the project manager and the customer!
So what can businesses do to bridge this chasm or avoid it altogether?
Is “excellence” a word that would describe everything you or your business does or produces? If not, you are in danger of becoming a commodity, being stuck in the race to the bottom, and going extinct!
In fact, Tom Peters, in his new book The Excellence Dividend, believes that a mindset of excellence is the antidote to job automation and product “Commodityville”.
Early in my career there was an incident in our office when one of the junior engineers handed a proposal to his manager for a final review before sending the proposal to the customer. The manager basically came unglued and ripped apart the junior engineer after he found a spelling mistake . . . in the client’s name!