Let’s imagine the following (real-life) scenario.
You go to a supermarket store to do your weekly shopping.
After you return home, you check the receipt to see that you were charged for 0.886 Kg of potatoes that you never bought.
On the other hand, you were never charged for the 0.886 Kg of kiwi fruit that you actually bought.
Your brain makes the right connections, and, surprise, surprise, the truth comes out that your kiwi fruit were mistaken for potatoes by the supermarket cashier, who did that by using the wrong product code.
You have three options, that is, you can see the situation from the point of view of: a) An ordinary customer, who likes the fact that he was given an unexpected gift by the supermarket, although he wouldn’t be that happy, if he was charged more than he should be, b) A former supermarket employee, who realizes that not much has changed since when he worked for a supermarket chain himself two decades ago, and notices that the same mistakes and errors keep being made by supermarket staff today, and c) A person with a certain level of experience and knowledge of management and leadership in various contexts and environments.
Oddly enough, these three options are not mutually exclusive.
This is because, in order for a supermarket manager/leader to be successful, he should have the customers’ interest at heart.
When a customer is wrongly charged, he is very likely to start losing his trust in the company that wrongly charged him.
If multiplied, this problem can result in major-scale problems for the supermarket company, which may even threaten its very existence in a highly competitive market.
When it comes to the second option, it shouldn’t be that difficult for a supermarket manager/leader to get in the shoes of a supermarket employee, especially if he started as an ordinary employee himself.
However, what happens in many cases is that, when an employee gets promoted to a managerial role, he starts having short memory problems all of a sudden.
He may sometimes become a totally different person by adopting a rigid approach to leadership and management, and not paying any attention and/or getting any feedback from employees at lower levels of the corporate hierarchy.
This is a highly ineffective approach, because the feedback, ideas, and opinions of those employees who have direct, first-hand experience with customers is precious, to say the least, and can help to address numerous seemingly unresolved problems and dead-end situations within a supermarket chain.
Regarding the third option, a true expert in management and leadership should be able to understand that employee errors and mistakes are a clear indication of excess workload.
Even worse than that, they can serve as signs of a confusion of duties and responsibilities, where an employee may have to literally run from one task to another, and even jump to the next task, without having completed, or done at all, the previous task.
Therefore, using the wrong product code is only the tip of the iceberg, since it is an indication of deeper problems that may exist within the supermarket chain, and which can also have a severely adverse effect on the company, in general, and on relations among various stakeholders of the supermarket chain, such as customers, employees, and managers and leaders, in specific.
Unless this problem is viewed through a holistic approach, it will remain unresolved for the decades to follow.