Most organisations say that customers are at the heart of everything they do, and they also express how much they value the people who work for them. If you speak to board members, executives and senior managers, they will often tell you that these beliefs are held with genuine intent and seen as essential to the organisation’s identity. But is that really how things play out in the Boardroom?
Most strategic decisions are driven by data, financial pressures and regulatory requirements. While these factors are important and should absolutely be considered, they do not always prompt the quality of conversations needed to understand the full impact of a decision. When was the last time someone asked how a proposal would change a customer’s experience, or what it is really going to mean for an employee on a day to day basis once that policy is in place?
We all recognise that if a customer feels good about an experience, they are more likely to engage with a service or buy from a company. In the same way, if a process makes an employee’s working life easier, they are more likely to use it and follow it. Yet these basic principles often get overlooked at a strategic level and left to be dealt with at an operational level, where colleagues are left grappling with the implementation of the latest dictate from the leadership team.
What difference would it make if, when decisions were being shaped, leaders took a moment to picture the colleague who will have to put that change into action, or the customer who will be on the receiving end of it? Would the choice look the same, or would the conversation shift slightly if the experience of the people who will encounter the outcome was considered at the point of decision, rather than addressed later on?
Strategic decisions have real impact and should not be made in the abstract. They turn up in someone’s day and change what that day looks and feels like. Whether that experience is clear or confusing, supportive or stressful, will influence how successful the decision is in practice. This is not about being sentimental. It is about having clarity about the impact you are trying to achieve and understanding how likely it is that the decision will be executed successfully. These considerations are not a ‘nice to have’. They can be the difference between progress and frustration, between success and failure in the long term.
Good leaders do not make decisions and then leave others to unpick them. They are deliberate about the experience they are trying to create and make choices that enable the people around them to turn that intention into reality. Perhaps experience deserves to be a bigger part of strategic thinking, not as an afterthought, but as a core indicator of whether a decision is likely to work.