This is one of my favorite questions to ask a “CEO, President, or Business Owner”…”What is the single most important thing in your business?”
I usually don’t get an answer right away or I get some “stalling dialog” while they are pondering the question. They normally don’t want to answer or say there isn’t one thing more important than others or it’s a combination of things. I don’t disagree…businesses are complex machines that have a lot of moving parts. But I still want to know what they are thinking. Sometimes they will tell me that there is an “internal leadership answer” and a “public/employee answer.” This is a whole different discussion I will save for another time.
After some discussion, something always comes out. What do you these leaders say the “one thing” is most of the time? Before I give you the answer, let me share some insights and the backstory to the answer they are about to give to me.
I start by asking some detailed and relatively simple questions…
- Where do you spend the most time during your day as a leader?
- What area of the business has the most investment/research dollars?
- What would your employees say if we asked them…anonymously?
- When you allocate funds to support innovation, what types of projects or ideas do they get spent on?
- And several others along the same lines…you get the idea.
These are just some of the starting questions. The order in which these questions are asked is what generates the most interesting responses. The key is to always ask these questions AFTER they are forced to an answer to the initial question of the one most important thing.
Drum roll please…here are the usual answers I hear.
- The answer most often given is either our “People“
- Second most common answer is something about our unique “Product/Service“
- If they are a public or employee owned company, then the “Shareholders”
- And finally, they offer up the “Customer” (I sometimes think they do that because they know how passionate I am about the customer.
- Finally “Sales” pops in just for good measure because there is the feeling that if sales are an important item then why are they in business
The majority of time, the customer isn’t the number one thing. Surprising? I will leave that to you to answer. Sure, they are very important…but not the MOST important.
What does this say about the company? What does it say about the passion of the leadership? What message does it send to employees AND customers?
After we have this list out on the table I go back and discuss the detailed questions I gave you a sampling of above. This is where we find out where most of the “time” and “resources” are being spent within the company. Where a company spends the most time and resources says a lot about a company. Since both of these are limited, they need to be spent wisely.
Alignment is critical…for employees, customers, and your leadership team. When out of alignment, bad things happen to companies…they just do…at some point this catches up with them. This simply adds risk to the survival and growth of the company. When parts of a company are out of alignment with the most important thing, this becomes the weak link competitors seek out when entering a new market or expanding in your market. The best companies take advantage of this misalignment.
But when things are in alignment…around the one thing…amazing things can happen. This gives companies focus…a rallying point to support everything they are doing. It becomes the passion and the “beacon on the hill” to go after and strive to achieve. And most importantly, your employees AND customers feel it, believe in it, and support it. It gives them the direction and guidance they need to do their best.
If you are a first time reader of my posts, I can tell you I am incredibly biased toward the customer. I whole heartedly believe the customer needs to be first. Great things happen when the customer is your “one thing”, the focal point of everything you create, lead, and sell. Teams rally around it, product/service development has more focus, and you create a differentiated brand that is incredibly difficult to emulate. You can move from a commodity to a leader in your industry.
Regardless of whether you choose the customer or something else, just pick it…rally around it and see amazing things happen. Like Curly said in the comedy movie City Slickers to Billy Crystal, “Do you know what the secret to life is? One thing, just one thing…you stick to that an everything else don’t mean #$!@. That’s what you’ve got to figure out.” It works for business too…What is your “one thing”?
