I was driving home from the airport on a Friday afternoon. It had been a long week. As the regional quality auditor for a large beverage company, I had done a mini-tour of my Southern California territory. My phone rings and I answer. It is my manager calling to let me know that a C-Level executive was currently in a store in East LA County and he was very upset because he thinks “the store looks like crap.” He explained that the executive saw outdated products everywhere, cases of product were sliced open and taped back together, there was dust and dirt all over the merchandise, and the owner of the store didn’t seem to have any answers. My boss told me that the executive is furious and wants something done right away.
I ended the call and immediately called my contact at the local distributorship that covered East LA County. As soon as I told him the name of the store, he sighed and said, “oh he had to go to that store.” You see, there is a sort of loose confederation of Assyrian-owned liquor stores in East LA County who use their own social and family connections to bypass the normal product distribution channels. In this case, the store had written several bad checks to the distributorship, so their account was cancelled. The store owner started obtaining product from friends and relatives who still had accounts to keep his store stocked.
The executive was furious about the condition of the store, but there was absolutely nothing that any of us from the quality control team or the distributorship could do about it. The executive walked into a situation with no context and no understanding of what was going on. All he knew is that he didn’t like the way his brand looked on the shelf. Nothing changed because of the panic he caused.
Power to the People
In most companies, there is some sort of program that attempts to get the executives “working with the people” for a period of time each year. This may involve having a CEO work on the phones in a call center, work in a retail store, or work on a manufacturing line. Any front-line person who has suffered through working alongside an executive in one of these programs can tell you how incredibly disruptive it is. People spend so much time fixing the executive’s mistakes and keeping him out of the way that almost nothing gets done. What is the supposed advantage of this? Executives would say that it helps them find out “what’s really going on” so they can make better decisions. I have to disagree. How does interrupting business, disrupting a location and getting in the way of the workflow help? If executives really wanted to find out what was wrong on the front lines, they would get a lot more from an objective study, or even casual conversations, than they could possibly gain from storming into a work location on a busy day.
What’s Going On Here?
The problem is that many executives don’t seem to understand that their job is strategic, not tactical. Grocery store executives shouldn’t know how to work the cash registers. That isn’t their job. Their job is to decide what information they need from the cash registers to help them make good decisions about the company. Auto company executives shouldn’t know how a car engine is put together. Their job is to make decisions about what types of engines consumers are likely to buy.
When executives get bogged down in minor issues like the conditions of a store in East LA County, they are distracting their attention from the strategic issues that actually matter to the company.
How Can We Help?
The tough thing about bad executive decision-making is that most people feel powerless to do anything about it. If a CEO doesn’t understand the proper scope and perspective of his job, he is certainly not going to look to a lowly peon for advice. However, managers, directors, and vice presidents can strongly influence an executive’s perception of his own job. When making a presentation to executives, focus on the strategic, organization-wide reasoning behind your proposal. Ask the CEO questions that relate to broad, strategic initiatives of the company, instead of asking for an opinion on what color a logo design should be. You can coach up the ladder and set a good example for executives by what you ask the CEO to do.
You didn’t say whether or not the executive inspecting the East LA County store was part of an executive “working with the people” type program.
If it was, then yes, I would agree with you that an executive has no business inspecting stores.
If it wasn’t and the executive was simply reporting the problem because he cares about the company and the products, then I can’t fault him.
Another problem about what you or anyone else thinks about what an executive should be doing is that they have the power, not us. They get paid the big salary, they have the position of authority. They can do whatever they want.
To be clear, this was just a “random visit” and I see your point about being concerned about the condition of the store. My main problem is that because someone is an executive, he should be focused on the big picture, not on a store in East LA County. True, they get paid the big dollars, but that is because we want them to think strategically, not nitpick at convenience stores.
Of course, I tend to be an anti-central-authority kind of person to begin with, so I don’t know that I can concede to the point that “They have the power, not us”