Written by: William Lee, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Inside a majestic northern Indian castle, Mr. K saw divergent paths in front of him.
This was his first break in more than 6 months. He was working 16+ hours a day, 7 days a week, developing a chronic condition that others mocked a nervous cough.
It was clear to him that he had to get away from the air pollution and the moldy hotels. He needed recovery times between business trips. Less clear was how he could reduce that when the business was growing at a frantic pace.
One thing’s certain. He could not endure much longer if the extreme work-life imbalance continued. His body would break down before the mind. So would his marriage and career.
Organic Growth
In the midst of a global financial crisis, Mr. K saw an opportunity to differentiate and outperform competitions.
With vastly deteriorating margins, anyone who could assist customers to achieve substantial improvements in operational efficiency, business growth, and financial flexibility would have an unassailable advantage.
Easier said than done.
In a developing economy, most enterprises are still in the stage of accumulating knowledge and skills, overwhelmingly by trial and error. Most capable are almost always locked in in revenue generation rather than people development. As the business grows, the talent concentration gets ever diluted until operational efficiency falls over a cliff.
Mr. K’s strategy was to assist customers to get over their growing pains and develop with them.
How could he achieve that when his own organization was experiencing the same problem?
Relationship Relationship Relationship.
Mr. K was a sales middle manager at the time.
In the world of business, when things go wrong, senior managers legally carry the ultimate responsibilities. But, the middle managers often bear the greatest (perceived) pains, self-inflicted or not.
So the initial connections between Mr. K and customer middle managers were easy and spontaneous.
All he needed was to reach out and say, “I saw/heard/smelt/tasted/felt ____. Are you okay? Perhaps it can help if you/I do ____? It’s going to work because _____. Even if it failed, you can explain like ______. It’s the best anyone can do in this situation, so you will be okay. And, don’t worry. Our discussion is just between us. You report as you want. Put my name in or not. It’s your decision.”
It’s not that Mr. K knew exactly what to do. It’s the conversation that involved deep understanding, empathy, good faith, and logical thinking that clicked. As a result, the customer’s reciprocation was natural and helpful.
To Mr. K’s surprise, as he found out later, his name was often mentioned in customers’ internal documents. He made an organic impression on customer senior managers without making direct connect.
Oh, don’t forget that, before visiting customer middle management, Mr. K had the habit of spending time at the ground level, interacting with customer employees and the environment, knowing full well that spy cams were everywhere. It was intelligence gathering. It was scouting. It was proofing that his observation was not groundless. It was bottom-up relationship building. But most important of all, it eased his mind. Knowing made him comfortable and in control.
Spontaneous Reactions
Mr. K’s personal success proved his strategy on high-volume high-value customers – the intended and the most profitable market segment. Scaling it, however, was an entirely different beast to tame.
He soon realized, not everyone in his team shared the same depth and range of technical sales capabilities. The challenge rested on convincing the team to invest time, not resources, to acquire deep understanding and empathy on customer production and the associated thought processes. Perhaps the most difficult was coaching the team to find that political balance between working for their own company and the customers'.
With struggle came inspiration.
Mr. K found inspiration from a concept called Dao Fa Zi Ran 道法自然 by an ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu 老子.
When a person makes contact with the external world through the five senses of vision 眼, hearing 耳, smelling 鼻, tasting 舌, and touching 身, a series of chain reactions occur spontaneously inside that person’s mind. The (sub)consciousness 意識then guides how that information collected is emotionalized, internalized, and processed to produce a decision outcome (see also: https://www.brainzmagazine.com/post/born-with-it-all).
When we are fully aware of how a decision is made, we are in a conscious state of mind. Otherwise, we act subconsciously, relying heavily on natural instinct. Regardless, Buddhist’s Prajnaparamita Sutra «波若波羅密多心經,» Taoism’s Tao Te Ching «道德經» and Confucianism’s Chung Yong «中庸» all inform that, with practice, we can plan, train and manage our own future with the right set of direction, mentality, and methodology.
The niche is knowing when, where, who, what, and how we surround ourselves in an environment aligned to the said spontaneous reactions that produce the desired outcome.
Do The Next Right Thing
In front of Mr. K were two divergent paths – give up, or build a new set of systems and processes to get his team fully immersed in a designed environment so that they could report value-adding information, learn the business intricacies, and build the hard-to-imitate solution-experience-and-relationship-based ecosystems congruently with the customers.
Giving up inevitably would shift the business to a commercial-selling business model filled with cold numbers. He wouldn’t want to work in that. Failing by trying, on the other hand, could lead to massive revolt from both sides of the corporate ladder, leading to his own demise.
To Mr. K, the choice was easy. He had never run away from problems, and he preferred the warmth generated from interacting with worthy people. He just hoped that his team would spontaneously react in a similar way, with minimum preaching.
“All one can do is the next right thing,” said Grand Pabbie in Disney’s Fronzen II in 2019.
A quote deeply resonated with Mr. K as he looks back.
William Lee, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
William Lee, a business coach and expert in connecting people’s wheels of fortune together, excels at producing positive results in complex multi-stakeholder engagement, end-to-end customer experience satisfaction, and remote team management. Frustrated by years of conflicts and external negativities, William dug deep to understand how our minds work, how we interact with one another, and how good faith can improve our connected world together. Through a process called CentriFusion, William’s methodology and system provide an easy first step to vastly improve team empathetic capability. With increased presence and engagement, as a result, fertile mental grounds are sown to enable organic and spontaneous growth, aligned to a shared common purpose. William provides the way to attain TRUE and SUSTAINABLE COMFORT in your businesses. Enjoy life without complacency!
