CIM fellow Mike Ashton is a consultant and trainer in brand strategy, customer experience and change management
Before setting goals for your team, get a little closer to the action by developing goals with your team. Listen and learn about the challenges they face at their level and work with them to develop solutions they can deliver. Ironically, this often produces tougher goals and secures 100 per cent ownership and loyalty.
Find out what your people really think about you. There are lots of techniques – 360 degree surveys, for example – and the results can transform performance.
Remember there’s no substitute for managers spending lots of time inside the operation to understand the nuts and bolts of what really goes on and how to influence things positively.
Marketing moves fast, so for the bottom-up manager, there is no hiding place. Continual reading and research is the order of the day and an efficient, structured process to access and assimilate this information is the only way to cope with the sheer volume.
Bottom-up management shouldn’t just include learning from staff, but from customers too. Our insight is often based on monthly or even quarterly reports. Before your next board meeting, why not give each executive the phone numbers of 10 recent customers. Get them to call and ask about these customers’ experience. It’s an unrivalled reality check.
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