In this article, I want to shed some light on a simple truth in any organization. If a topic is priority, you have to assign someone to take care of it. If you want something done, you have to assign a name to it.
You have all the ingredients, but no chef
Assume you’re looking to improve your customer experience. You have everything in place. Great communication, a cool web shop, an amazing product, solid fulfillment processes and a quick customer support.
But somehow, it’s still not a consistent client experience.
Or another example: You want to decrease your employee turnover. Compensation seems okay, recruiting also solid. And the management team seems to do a good job as well. Why is it still so high?
The above situations can be described with a kitchen without a chef. All the ingredients are there, well-prepared. But there’s nobody to blend and process everything together to create something great out of it.
Assign responsibility for an outcome to orchestrate activity
If you find yourself in a situation like this, where everything should work but it doesn’t, there’s a simple solution. Assign a name to it.
Give someone in the team (or a new person from the outside) the responsibility to reach the desired result.
This person’s job will be to orchestrate all existing measure, to fill in the blanks and to align everyone on the mission.
Think about it: All individual functions have their own goals. It takes a horizontal layer on top of that to direct the efforts towards the same outcome.
These roles are often called program manager or project manager. But they might as well hold a title that includes the thing they’re responsible for, like Head of Customer Experience.
So the next time you feel things should be working, but they’re not: Assign the responsibility for that topic to one person.