Mandating the Outcome
How a bad, but common, business practice opens a GTM opportunity
Hi all —
This week, I realized that there is a typical behavior in business that you can take advantage of in your go-to-market: Mandating the Outcome.
It is a nasty practice that seems to pop up time and again. I saw it when I was a consultant at McKinsey, and I see it now in totally different market segments. It happens in startups and Fortune 500s alike.
The story goes like this:
Executives decide that something is really important.
So they mandate the company’s managers to achieve a certain metric (representing the desired outcome) - usually adding that metric to the managers’ bonus calculations or performance reviews.
Executives provide no training, guidance, or tools enabling managers to achieve this metric
Executives are shocked when (1) the metric gets gamed, (2) the underlying business doesn’t improve, and (3) managers lose morale
I am seeing this currently playing out across the hourly work space as executives try to get frontline managers to focus on employee retention.
They dictate the outcome: “Our goal is to reduce turnover from 200% to 100% by the end of 2022.” And then they tie frontline managers’ bonuses to achieving this metric. And they set up dashboards to track turnover because “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Ultimately frontline managers don’t know how to achieve this goal. They can easily come up with ways to game the metric so executives’ dashboards turn green. Of course, the underlying problem - employee turnover - doesn’t get solved.
As executives come to realize this, they do one of two things:
Go down the futile path of refining the metric to make it “un-gameable”
Come to the realization that they need to provide a coherent, achievable set of actions for managers to take to achieve the desired outcome - and tools to support the transformation.
This is your opportunity. Any time you see executives Mandating the Outcome, you can swoop in and help shift them towards Supporting the Transformation by:
Educating them on what it takes to achieve the Outcome
Explaining how your software helps their managers do what it takes
And watch out, because there’s probably some part of your business where you’re Mandating the Outcome!