“…the ability of your company to be competitive & survive lies in the capability of the people in your organization to understand a situation and develop solutions.”
When problems arise within teams, we feel the solutions are found with the other guy – what our competitors are doing must be better.
We search outside our box…and this leaves the work, talent, solutions and success internally worsened.
We should spend more time benchmarking what we do really well.
Return to internal tasks + goals + solutions. Look inside the box, your successes & talents determine what is working, where you would like to be, and what is the first step.
What your competitors are doing will not match your team, culture, goals, processes, systems, etc… And they have already tried succeeded failed & learned what works inside their box.
What is being done by your competitors you can learn from AND it can only be a process for your existing team when YOUR TEAM makes it their own.
You are the benchmark;
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to be?
- What is the first step you can take to get there?
For example, if you find your customer service team cannot respond quickly enough to customer returns, you might think, “I wonder how Zappos handles this?” OR you could stay inside your box and ask;
- How fast is our customer service team currently responding to returns?
- How fast should they be in handling returns?
- What is the first step to take in moving closer to where we want to be?
What we are looking for is success ahead of the competition, not perfection.
Only you can determine success in your context.
Inspired to write this post from reading Toyota Kata
michael cardus is create-learning
image by Neal.