So I have an MBA and work in a corporate environment in probably one of the most businessy functions with businessy language that relies on businessy theories imaginable, Marketing.
My group recently transitioned to a new leader. This week, in one of his first major communications, he took time to expound upon why it is important to focus on the details. What prompted the post is the need to highlight one of his pet peeves since taking on the position, which is that, throughout the organization, our group name is sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect. Apparently our group name has an "s" at the end of it, which I legitimately did not know and does not seem like proper grammar to me. None-the-less it does but not everyone in the organization employs the "s" consistently and this really bothers the new group head. I will point out, that this is not a customer facing name, but an internal one only.
He the blog post, the leader goes on to point out that in order to standout in this competitive environment, we must be excellent in the details. He cites the "no broken window" NYC Police example that I have seen in HBR articles and I believe was in a Malcolm Gladwell book. I also went on to read convincing exmaples in HBR articles about how if there is a broken vending machine that management doesn't fix, it sends the message to employees that they aren't important who in turn treat clients like they aren't important as well. The leader points out that small mistakes in power points ultimately reflects on our own professionalism and brand. He cites that coming up through the corporate world, he would not only spend hours working through the substantive ideas but then additional hours going over the painstaking details of his presentation.
*Now I will take the time to explain my caveat. This post made me very defensive. First of all, I have recently had a few interactions with this leader and I am now worried I had a typo or said something inappropriate. I also saw that in a presentation I posted to our company's internal social media site, I had a typo using "Srategy" instead of "Strategy." So to some extent, I feel like this post was a comment on my own presentation. I know stupid grammar and spelling mistakes are a weakness of mine in general and so this post had made me very defensive.*
Personally- I have had managers in the past who had been very nit picky in this regard. What I found is that this nit pickyness only exacerbated my tendency to make these mistakes. Since working under managers who have not had this tendency, I am more relaxed and confident and while these mistakes still happen, they are less frequent. I would add that working under nit picky managers like also made my job much more stressful and less pleasant and I found that my capacity was taken up with paranoia rather than good thoughtful work.
Corporate Social Media- I will say that I was one of the early adopters of our corporate social media site. I think it is a great way to facilitate communication across the organization and learn what is going on. I will say that in our group in particular, folks have been slow to adopt and share ideas here. I have encouraged folks to not be fully buttoned up here and to just post half baked ideas as a result. I know I myself have posted questions with weird subject lines that by most would not be considered professional. By the way my personal view on internal communications is that the subject line should be funny and engaging so that folks will actually read them b/c most things, I would argue, do not get read. Therefore, I consider non-boring emails and blog posts to be extremely professional, though I think there may be a generational divide here.
I also want to point out that I do believe there is a different in client facing v. internal facing work. I would argue that both, however, due to time and resources, require a balance b/t focusing on the details versus delivering against the big picture quickly.
Client Facing- What does focusing on the details when client facing really mean? Proper grammar and spelling? Of course, those are givens. My question is where do you draw the line. For every comment we receive from a client, do we spend the time and money to investigate what exactly went wrong in that instance? Do we then spend the money to fix whatever that problem is because it was an issue for the one client? As a strategic marketer, I would say no. I would say we place our bets and try to best meet the needs of our target clients. Even then, we cannot address every need these clients face. We have to look at our business and the resources available to best determine which need. So I do agree that for where we are deciding to place our bets, those experiences need to be perfect especially around the details. That however, does not mean for the places we are not placing our bets we let them just devolve into chaos. We have to decide for those what is good enough. My husband is a patent examiner. Everything he does is client facing. When I spoke to him about this, he gave me an example of when he first started his job. He was asking his manager how is he supposed to do a thorough and good job of determining weather something is completely patent-able or not in the time he is given? Especially when his clients at times are multimillion dollar corporations with fleets of lawyers and potentially significantly more time working on the other side of this? How can the resources he can bring to bare complete? His boss told him he was looking at it all wrong. His boss said, you are given 31 hrs to do the best job you can in determining if the idea is patent-able. Basically, these are the resources at your disposal and you must do the best job possible.
Internal Facing- I think we as a business, as I imagine most businesses do, struggle with deciding where to place our bets. It is rarely the case that those bets have clear boundaries so we struggle with deciding which experiences need to be perfect versus those which need to be good enough. Unlike my husband, we rarely have set resources, Deadlines are suggestions and if work is in flight we can always find the money by robbing peter to pay paul. You know what I think would help with this? Getting faster and messier. Allowing ourselves sketch fazes where we can be sloppy but the goal is to communicate, analyze and place our bets. I agree, in the execution of things, we need to be precise and buttoned up but in the initial stages of work, I want folks to be fast and loose and comfortable. I want them to speak up without fear of being reprimanded for not being perfect. Let's get our stupid mistakes out now so they aren't there later. That said I don't know how to balance this idea with what I think is right about the leaders original sentiment. Perfection is like a muscle, you must work it out over and over again so that is becomes and habit.
