Mr Whiteside could not understand why his company’s sales figures were so dramatically going down. He owned a small company producing and supplying beef burgers to local supermarkets in the area. Since a while the supermarkets were reporting back to him that there simply was not that much demand for his product.
Mr Whiteside was determined to find the reason why. He assembled all his three managers and together they have decided on the plan of action. One of them was responsible for conducting a new market research to check it the demand for beef products has gone down, another was looking at new marketing strategies, the last one was responsible for new pricing strategies and keeping an eye on what the competition is doing. It was agreed that the managers were to present the results of their work during another meeting within a months’ time.
A month went by and Mr Whiteside left that meeting even more confused. None of it made sense, the demand for beef burger products was still as high as ever before, their pricing was now more competitive than ever and their competition within this segment of the market was almost none existent. As he was leaving the conference room where the meeting was held, he decided to walk down the factory floor. He stopped unknowing to himself next to one of the workers’ station, deeply engaged in his own thoughts. The man looked at the ‘Big Boss’ and asked him if he was ok. Mr Whiteside told him how frustrated and puzzled he was by the decline in sales and how there was just no obvious reason for it. The worker stopped what he was doing and said, ‘Mr Whiteside, exactly two months ago Andy down there decided to experiment with a new burger recipe. We told him he has no authority to do that and that it was a risky business! A few of us down here have even try to speak to one of the managers about it, but they were too busy ‘doing business’. The burgers just do not taste the same, Mr Whiteside. I am not surprised that people do not want to buy them, they just do not taste the same!’
It took two weeks and a ‘Old Recipe’ label on each burger and a disciplinary action against Andy for Mr Whiteside to be back in business again. But it also got him thinking – how potentially devastating the results of not not being directly involved and informed about all the levels of business this could have been for him?
As a general manager, how well do you know your own company? How often do you take the time to talk to your staff across all the levels of the company? It is a risky business to just rely on the reports of the managers in charge. It pays to be informed. It pays to take the time and listen to what an ordinary Joe Soap has to say. He might just work on the factory floor, he might seem insignificant and unimportant, but he might be the one who knows just how much of expensive raw material is wasted and thrown away each week or what really needs to be done to increase productivity. How would he know? He deals with this stuff every day!
The view from behind the desk is often affected by pie charts, statistics and comparisons, all quite removed from the hands on issue Joe Soap is dealing with day-to-day.
It is time to let go of the ‘Me-Them’ way of conducting business, where the management is so far removed from the staff, that the two groups seem to be drifting in two different directions. It has taken most companies years to create various elaborate layers of company structure, deepening the division between the employee and the employer for the sake of protecting the latter one. Those walls we have so meticulously built collapse every now and then, when we realise that both the staff and the higher management are crucial to the survival of the company and that a mutual appreciation and collaboration is needed from both sides in order for the company to thrive.
Complimentary 30min Business/Personal Coaching Session