Tips for Better Understanding Your Company

Often when you’re at the top of a company, what you understand about that company might not necessarily be what other people think about it. This is completely normal. You interact with the business in a different way to lower-level employees, or customers, or suppliers. 

However, it’s always good to have as detailed an understanding of your company as possible, and sometimes it can be beneficial to look at it in a slightly different way. If we keep on looking at our company from the same viewpoint then it’s likely it will continue to make the same mistakes, but if we can change things up and see it from a different perspective, then perhaps we can start to fix some of the things we didn’t know were wrong in the first place.

Learn from the People at the Heart of Your Company

The bigger your company is, the harder it can be to understand just how it works and what makes it successful. However, there are always people you can ask who will provide a slightly different perspective, and they are your employees. 

It can be a hard barrier to break through, but being able to get honest, constructive feedback from employees can make a massive difference to how you look at your company. Look to speak to employees in different areas of the company and use their wisdom to better inform you about your business. 

Delve Deeper into the Numbers

We all use numbers to inform our decisions, but do we really take enough time to figure out what the data is telling us? We have so much data available in today’s world; the difficulty is working out what all that data is telling us. 

By taking a more statistics-based approach, we can see our company in a slightly different light and come up with testable methods to create improvement. 

Sign up for a course like Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certification and start to understand how statistical analysis can boost your business’ performance.  The numbers can tell you lots of things about your business, but you need to know how to test for them and how to use them to your advantage. 

Ask Your Clients

Our clients are probably the most important part of the equation, but we often forget to ask them how we are doing. Getting feedback from customers is an excellent way to learn everything you could want to know about your business. 

As hard as we try, we don’t necessarily convey the values that we want to send to our customers, and we don’t always offer them the service we think they do. The best way to find out is by asking them. You don’t want to hassle them, but the information you can learn from your customers can be invaluable. Find a way to incentivize your clients to give you honest, open feedback, and use it to make your business better. 

It’s fine for the owners and the employees to think one thing about your business, but if the customers don’t think the same thing, then is it really an accurate reflection of your company?