Your offhand remarks become company policy
Most people in your business want to get behind you. So, when you say something in passing at a leadership meeting, they take it as settled and start building plans around it.
Two years later, and you've forgotten you said it. But they're still working to it.
We watched a version of this in a CEO forum. Fourteen of us were in the boardroom of a large law firm, near the top of one of the most expensive towers in the city. The CEO hosting us told the group that marketing isn't important to his firm, because they win work through their partners and the quality of what they produce.
We asked why he pays for that office space.
He said it matters that the market sees them as a premium firm, and that a prime building on a prime floor does that.
One of the other CEOs asked why that didn’t count as ‘marketing’.
What had gone on
This CEO had at some point decided the firm wouldn't spend on advertising. Over the years, that morphed into "we don't do marketing", and nobody ever put those two things side by side.
He's the CEO and his statements turn into the assumptions that everyone else works from.
The cost here wasn’t a marketing budget. A perfectly valid strategy got ruled out for years by a sentence that simply went unexamined by the company at large. I'd guess somebody in his firm brought a sensible proposal to him at one time and got told, “that isn't how we operate”.
The three we hear most often – and why they’re dangerous
"Our customers don't care about price.”
Usually, this is based on a handful of conversations from several years ago, before two new competitors arrived on the scene who are now challenging you.
"We've tried that before."
This means something was tried once, under different conditions, with nobody accountable for making it work. It didn’t, and so the whole concept has been written off.
"That's not our market."
Frequently, it’s the market that's grown fastest since you last had that conversation, and it means you could be missing out on a big opportunity.
Each one of these phrases closes a door. After a while, nobody can remember who closed it or what evidence they had to do so.
Four things to do about it
Before you repeat a belief about your business this year, ask yourself what evidence supports it now (not when you formed it).
Watch your absolutes. “Never”, “always”, “we don't”. Those are the sentences your people quote back to each other to shut down a conversation.
Ask each member of your leadership team to write down three beliefs they think you hold about the business. Compare their lists with what you actually think.
Give one person explicit permission to challenge you in front of everyone else, and thank them the first time they do it. Everyone will be watching how you take it.
That law firm mentioned does excellent work. Where the CEO had got stuck was in believing excellent work sells itself, and he'd said it often enough that the people around him stopped hearing it as an opinion.
We spend a lot of our time telling CEOs what their business believes about them.