The Problem with ‘Big Picture’ CEO’s
I spent eight years at lululemon and for most of those eight years I spent one shift per week on the retail floor folding pants, restocking, working the fit rooms, and helping our guests find products and services. Without fail our management meetings would be energized with feedback from our leadership team’s retail store floor shifts.
The act of working the retail floor was not lip service; the intention was that we rolled up our sleeves, worked with the guests and as regular store Educators. It was an opportunity to learn from guests and colleagues alike on what was working and not working in real time and not in some lame focus group.
As the company grew and as we hired more ‘professional’ retailers, this practice dwindled because of the ‘we are too busy’ syndrome and the ‘my time is better spent at head office’ doctrine. When I read the Fast Company article ‘Why “Big Picture Only” Bosses Are The Worst’ by Robert I. Sutton, it brought back memories of this debate at lululemon.
We all know that it is easy to get stuck in the trees and forget the forest. Your day to day customer acquisition and tactical execution encompasses so much of your time that you forget the forest: the strategy. I see this often in our work with start-ups. CEOs forget to remind themselves why they are doing what they are doing and need quarterly pivots back to their strategic direction.
It is also easy to become so focused on high level thinking that you forget the basics like customer service and the little details of following through on commitments. At lululemon, people at head office were so into doing the analysis of numbers and the reading of reports, a comfort zone no doubt, that they hid behind these reports instead of actually speaking to people that mattered the most: their customers.
I am not a fan of elitist leadership. In my opinion, strategy must be driven as much from the line workers as the executive management team. Only until those who execute strategy are enrolled in the creation of this strategy is there true commitment from the entire team. The delivering of results is founded upon successfully generating relationships and alignment. This happens with enrolling everybody in a co-created audacious future. Strategy is not for the top to create, it is for the top to facilitate.
If you want to truly understand your customers and your line workers, walk a mile in their shoes. And walk in these shoes before it is too late. Lest you forget.
Written by: Darrell Kopke, Skool Principal
Absolutely, 100% true. The front line is where the questions and answers are. The further we move away from it, the less likely we are to meet the front-line customer needs. As customers, we can easily tell the difference between a store or any other consumer-facing business that gets it and one that does not.