Every now and again you read an article about management that is so obvious, you wonder why everyone isn’t doing it. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article on
Management Practices That Work is such an article. It describes the results of interviews with over 100,000 managers in 400 business units in 230 companies around the world. The interviews looked at dozens of management practices and the management outcomes they produced.
Of all the management practices they looked at, three stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their ability to improve performance. The three practices are:
- Having clear roles for employees (accountability)
- Having a clear vision for the future (direction), and
- Having an environment that encourages staff openness, trust and challenge (culture).
These three practices in combination were better predictors of success than any other individual management practices including hot practices like customer centricity, fostering innovation or using detailed performance measures.
The three factors show not only that creating a great place to work provides an organisation with a competitive advantage, but also, that it is only in developing a balance of a number of complementary management practices that allows organisations to deliver this advantage. Just focussing on one management practice without understanding the other complementary practices that need to be developed at the same time is a recipe for under-performance.
As John Roberts shows in his book The Modern Firm: Organisational Design For Performance & Growth, the same understanding of complementary practices applies at all levels of an organisation, including lower-level CRM , CEM and Customer Co-creation projects.
Food for thought next time you are planning an investment in CRM, CEM or Customer Co-creation.
What do you think? Do you know what complementary practices are required to compete on CRM? Or are your CRM projects never as successful as they should be
Post a comment and get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager
