We took a quick look yesterday at the Closing Ceremony for the Winter Olympics, which was painful (Shatner, really?) but as we flipped to another channel, we ran across Undercover Boss on CBS. The premise of the series is simple: a boss from a large company works “undercover” at the frontlines of the business. The (first?) episode was one of the family owners of White Castle working shifts at several of their restaurants and at two of their supply facilities.
On the downside, like all reality TV, the show appears heavily scripted / produced. For instance, in just three days of working, the White Castle owner encountered a bunch of great people working in the fast food restaurants, such as a 17-year old aspiring chef (who was then promptly given a scholarship). On the upside, I have personally experienced how incredibly distant top management can be from frontline issues and this show could just give a bunch of people a nudge to experience their own companies.
Now startup founders might think that this show obviously only applies to large corporations. After all, they know all of their employees by name and see them every day. But there is an important analog that is available to even the smallest startup: use your own product/service as if you were just a regular enduser. It is so easy to get caught up in the “fog of startup” that sometimes glaring product/service issues go unnoticed or at least stay unresolved (acting as an enduser is also good discipline for board members!).
As a startup gets larger founders would do well to go back and take on roles like customer service or sales for a day. Of course they won’t be incognito, but it will still prove to be an eye opening experience. In addition, new hires for senior positions should start out rotating through or accompanying some of those roles as well. This will expose people with a fresh set of eyes to what is actually going on, which even in a startup can be quite different from what founders (and the board) have led themselves to believe.
