I report to…

I hear those words a lot.  "Hi!  My name is ... I report to ..."  I may have missed the part of orientation that taught us that standard introduction.  It's what we say when we meet someone new, or start working with a new team. Sometimes to me it feels like a security blanket of sorts.  Or a justification as to why that person showed up to a certain meeting.  Regardless of why it happens, it happens.  A lot.  To me, that phrase has become a symbol of why we as a company, still have a way to go with our transformation.

At the risk of repeating myself over and over... I'd like to refresh us all on the "why" of this transformation we are all working on.


Our customers matter.  They count on us to help them achieve their financial goals.  Without them, and their continued use of our services, we wouldn't have a company (and consequently jobs, which means we would not be a part of so-and-so's organization!) 



Our customers matter so much that we have recognized as an organization that we can't keep doing it the same way we've always done it because our customers expect more from us.  They expect innovation.  They expect us to continually improve our products so their lives are easier, and they can focus on more important things.  They expect us to continuously make managing their finances and achieving a healthy financial state easier, more seamless.  


We haven't been living up to that challenge by working the way we have been working.  We do great things, but with the big projects and the silos and the handoffs and the dependencies and the complexity... it takes too long to get any improvement or new feature in our customers' hands.  


We all know how things work.  We do our jobs, and then someone downstream picks up where we left off.  Sometimes it's just one handoff.  Often times it's many, many handoffs before the work that we do ends up in front of a customer or a user.  We don't view "team" as the people who have to work together, end-to-end to create something valuable for our customers.  We view team through the lenses of "I report to..."  That view is reinforced in everything around us.  It's reinforced by how we get work instructions.  It's reinforced by who we have to get "approval" from to do something.  It's reinforced by how information is cascaded and shared with us.  It's reinforced by how budgets are created and funded.  It's reinforced by how we create and assign objectives.  It's reinforced by how we introduce ourselves (I report to...)  


Until some of us are brave enough to take a hard look at how we are reinforcing the "way it's always been" and are willing to do what feels very scary and risky, well - a lot of this work we're doing to "transform" may give us small measures of improvement, but it won't really solve our problem. 


I imagine now at least some of you are asking "Ok Coach Dan, you're so smart, what IS the answer?  How DO we get to transform?  How DO we get to the point where we are meeting up to our customer's expectations?"  (Trigger warning-here comes one of those frustrating coach answers that you all hate so much...)  It depends. 

It's a big shift

The changes we need to make aren't better checklists, or a smoother process flow, or better intake processes, or sharper PowerPoint slides, or more certifications in Scrum.  The changes we need start with an acknowledgement that everything and everyone about how we work has to shift, and it has to shift together.  The entire value-chain (from idea to deployment and beyond) needs to change together, along with all of the supporting organizations have to shift.  In the world we talk about transforming to (the vision state), each manager may still manage the same people, but their jobs are incredibly different.  Let me share an example.

Let's say we "did it right."  We pulled together a group of "doers" from across the organization. 

  • We have someone who knows the customer and how they work and think. 
  • We have someone who knows the business and how the products work. 
  • We have someone who knows the applicable regulations and laws. 
  • We have someone who knows the tools and systems and data and channels that customers (or users) use. 
  • We have people who can build, fix and adjust those tools and systems and data and channels.
  • We have someone who can test whatever this group creates, and ensure that what gets built not only works, but works well for our intended users and makes their general life easier as they go about their business. 
  • We have someone who can deploy what is built so that a customer use it.
  • We have someone who can help us figure out how well the solution is working, how well the customer likes it, so we can continually improve.

All of these people would need to come from all across the organization, because that's where that expertise lies (and that's how we've chosen to organize ourselves.) 

Let's say we pulled THAT group together and said to them,

"OK. For the next 2 years, you all will work together to solve problems for our customers, in a way that helps the bank achieve our overall goals. By the end of those two years, we would like to:
  • Reduce the overall cost for your solution by xxx%. Achieve xxx business results (new card holders, more deposits, bigger balances, increased customer engagement, whatever) 
  • Be compliant with all applicable laws and regulations,
  • Partner up with the other teams in your customer's journey to ensure that you all collectively maintain a NPS score of xxx.
Your managers and leaders are here to help support you with training and knowledge, and they can help you pressure test your ideas and decisions. They will also be there to ensure that you can focus all of your energy on working with this team to solve these problems and achieve these results.

Your Product Manager is the ultimate authority in which problems get solved and how they are solved. They are the only approval you will need for decisions about who, what, where and how. You will be measured on how well your team collectively achieves their objectives and by how well you contributed to achieving the teams shared goals. You and your Product Manager are expected to make incremental progress toward those goals, and if you can find ways to exceed those goals, then by all means, have at it."

That example is our vision. Our North Star. Yes, it's difficult to imagine from our current situation how that will be possible. It is possible. A lot of things have to change, policy wise, procedure wise, mindset wise, organization wise... but it is possible. The question is, are we brave enough to take the risks it's going to take to get there.
So what, Coach Dan... I'm not in charge. I don't get to make those decisions... why are you telling me this?

Small things we all can do to help get closer to how we want to be

Well, you're right, most of us aren't in the position to make these kinds of changes (although some of us reading this actually are...)

That said, each of us can do some things, today, right now, to help us take a collective step forward in the direction we want to go.  Maybe if we all take some steps forward together, the gap between the "as is" and the "to be" may seem a little less scary.  Maybe it'll help those big changes feel a little less overwhelming.
  1. Be transparent with your individual performance objectives. You can share your individual performance objectives with your cross-functional partners.  You can ask them (up and down stream) to share theirs.  Maybe by sharing those things with each other, you can collectively find things that you can do differently that will make it a little easier for everyone to achieve their individual objectives.  It all starts with sharing, and nothing is stopping you from doing that today.
  2. Talk about the "so what." We all have a full plate, and I bet it's not getting any less full each day.  Are you really clear about why you're doing the things you are, and for whom?  Remember I said earlier, we all serve the customers, or we serve people who do serve customers.  With every report you generate, line of code you write, test you run, requirement you document, or deck you create, can you say how our customers benefit from that effort?  If you can't, then ask your manager.  If they don't know, ask your cross-functional partners.  If they don't know - keep asking.  If you can't draw a line between the work you're doing, and the customer who benefits because of it, then how do you know you're working on what's most important to them?
  3. Bring people closer to the problem being solved. As frequently as possible, get as many of the people who contribute to solving a problem (or creating something) together to talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it.  a) it will help draw the line between what everyone is doing, and for what customer (see #2 above) and b) it creates an opportunity for people to say "hey, what if we..." which is where all the best ideas for improvement come from!  For those of us who work in pretty rigid silos, this may be challenging, but still worth talking about.  
  4. Support each other. When things change, people react in a lot of different ways.  Be open and accepting when changes hit leaders, managers and teams.  Recognize that even the best planned changes can result in unanticipated and unexpected situations.  If you and your partners have common objectives (see #1) and a common customer (see #2) it can make navigating those unexpected situations a little easier to manage.
  5. Introduce yourself by who you serve, instead of by who your boss is. "Hi, my name is Dan.  I help customers have better experiences with our company by helping the teams who serve them become more Effective, Efficient and Engaged."
I appreciate everything you all do, every day to help create valuable things for our customers.  I appreciate our leaders and managers for encouraging us to reimagine (and not just relabel.)  As much as I'd like, we can't wave a magic wand and resolve all of the challenges we face while we transform to better meet our customer's expectations.  I am also aware that in order to be how we want (need) to be, our leaders, managers and teams all have to make scary, uncomfortable changes - and that is very hard to do.  WE can support them, and help make some of those changes seem less scary by finding small ways to make it easier to win together.

We all win together!




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