Who Comes First?
A company is operated by its
employees, run by a CEO, financed by investors, and so on. In this matrix of
varying types of stakeholders, we thought that it would be stimulating to find
out who was considered to be the most important in the eyes of the different
individuals.
To understand what perceptions people
had, ValueStrat Consulting and Customer Value Foundation conducted a survey on
corporate executives and asked 4 basic questions as follows:
1. Who comes first in your view?
2. Who comes second, in your view?
3. According to you, who does your CEO
consider comes first?
4. According to you, who does your CEO think
comes second?
All questions are to get the views of only the executive. In the first two
they give their view and in the 3rd & 4th they give what
they think their CEO’s view was.
The results of the survey are as
follows:
Executives’ view of who comes first and second
We found that 71% or nearly three-quarters of those surveyed felt that according
to them, the Customer comes FIRST while about a fifth (21%) felt
that the Employee comes First.
Just over half (54%) executives felt
that the Employee came second while a quarter (24%) felt that the Customer
comes second.
This is a very interesting point
because it means that a staggering 95%
or almost all of them respondents felt that the Customer comes first or second
in their scheme of things. Also, according to 75% of the executives, employees
were in the top two important entities.
Conclusion: In the view of the respondents, the
Customer is on top, followed by the Employees
Now let us look at what the executives
thought their CEO’s view was. We did this by asking how they thought their CEO
would answer the same 2 questions, and here are their answers:
What Executives thought their CEO’s view of
who comes first and second
45% of the executives felt that their
CEO would think that the Investor comes first while 42% would put the customer
first. Only 9% put the employees first.
Bottom Line: Surprisingly (or not), we can discern
a distinct disparity between what executive felt about who is important and
what they thought their CEO considered important. And they clearly felt that their CEO thought nothing
much of their employees. That they cared more for their investors than their employees!
The results are startling in that the
executives did not share the views they felt their CEOs had. This is a huge disconnect
between executive thinking and their perception of CEO thinking! This
being the case, it is imperative that the company takes measures to remove this
perception-gap and align the processes for better efficiency and profitability.
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ValueStrat
Consulting @ValueStrat helps businesses
understand where they are currently and what they need to do to get where they
want to go. For this, we provide essential strategic plans and approaches,
called “Keys”, to enable businesses to open up competencies, create
value and deliver profitability. ValueStrat gets to the DNA of business - Desire, Need and
Ability - to help you ask some critical
questions such as discussed above. Check out http://www.valuestrat.in for more
Customer
Value Foundation (CVF)
helps companies to Create Value for the employees, business partners, customers
and society and thereby for shareholders. Visit www.customervaluefoundation.com
to know how to help your company Create Value.
