In Jeff Immelt’s review of Ranjay Gulati's book Reorganize for Resilience, he states: “Leaders will have to radically restructure their strategies to break through internal barriers.”
We here at Valkre have got pretty cool jobs in that we get to see this breakthrough happen all the time. One of the most engaging activities our customers go through is called a boot camp, in which cross-functional teams get together to align on their Differential Value Proposition so they can systematically get feedback on it from their customers. During these sessions, the internal bias and barriers are striking every time as sales, marketing, management and others try to agree on the reason they are in business in the first place.
In a recent boot camp, the sales team was not too keen on asking customers for their feedback as they felt management wasn't ready to act on that feedback...even though the entire room agreed that candid conversations with customers on the value prop was exactly what they needed. If you are not comfortable talking to customers about how to grow with them, that hesitance is a huge barrier to growth.
So how did that team break the barrier? Management suggested the group is going to do something different:
- Treat this like a commercial business process
- Use rich, detailed and contextual data to make a compelling case for investment in our customers
- Act on the things that we can in order to help our customers
- Set customer expectations on what we can't do without their financial assistance
In this case, a leader changed how they do things to break through internal barriers to growth. They were going to use a data-driven approach to responsibly collaborate with customers in a resource constrained environment. For this team, the customer feedback is coming in the next few weeks – feedback that is powerful enough to break through any unforeseen internal barriers to growth and will shape how the strategy gets restructured.
What internal barriers are you facing? How are to trying to break through them?
We need to ask ourself.
Are we Breaking Silos or Building Silos
http://customervaluefoundation.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/building-silos-or-breaking-silos-internal-customers-is-a-flawed-concept/
Posted by: Customer Value Foundation | October 19, 2013 at 01:51 AM