My wife and I were driving the other day when, out of the blue, she looks over at me and says, “I hate that shirt you’re wearing, it looks terrible on you.” Suppressing the urge to say, “What do you mean, I like this shirt!”, I instead (and much more intelligently) said, “OK, thanks for telling me; lets go through my closet when we get home and you can tell me what else in it you hate.” The Salvation Army got a good load from me the next day.
Like most guys, I had fallen into the trap of buying (casual) clothing that I liked (forgetting that I’m not the one seeing me), and more, my frame of reference hadn’t quite got updated every year.
Does this sound maybe a little like the processes that run your firm? If they haven’t been updated in the last year or so, they are almost certainly wanting, if not outright out of date. If they were designed to make your job easy (or efficient, or any other measure you care to name), then they are most certainly inappropriate. Because the only thing that matters is what your customers think of them.
You may need a What Not to Wear-type makeover for your company’s processes, which is to say, for your company.
