I walked in early for a meeting I had with the Director of the Project Management Office at a company I worked for once upon a time. I took a seat in front of her desk and saw written on the white board the following, “We are perceived as not nimble and slow to change. Why?”.

Now the obvious answer was, “Because we’re not Agile”, and while I had thought of writing that anonymously underneath on the board, that’s not what I would like to discuss in this post.

Looking at the text scrawled on the board I started thinking, why is any organization perceived in any way at all? And is this simply the market perception? Or is it reality?

I’ve come to the conclusion that, in this case, our reputation was self inflicted and earned one bad decision at a time. I also came to the conclusion that all these bad decisions came from a core belief held at the highest levels of the organization. And that this core belief had never been explicitly stated to the rest of the employees.

This core belief cemented my decision to leave the company.

They were willing to negotiate on quality.

In a meeting with all the team leads and project managers, a senior VP said to me, that when faced with a good solution and a quicker or less expensive bad one, we would present both to the client, recommend the good one and let them choose which option they wanted to go with. After all, it’s their money, right?

Of course, the client would inevitably choose the bad solution, get the software , hate it, hate us, and eventually leave. And we would be stuck building our new code on top of this inherited bad code that is comprised of one short cut after another. Eventually, you get to the point where you have amassed so much technical debt that every change in code takes longer and longer to make and the software becomes more and more fragile.

The more important consequence of this core belief is that we end up putting the decision of how we are going to be represented in the marketplace into the hands of our clients. We let them decide how we’re going to deliver or fail to do so. As I mentioned above, the client would inevitably be unhappy with the quality of the product and over time they would eventually leave. You can imagine what this now former client would say to potential future clients about the quality of our software.

I propose trying the following exercise to ensure that you are continually making decisions in a manner that is consistent with the reputation you would like your organization to have.

Choose three to five words you want people to associate with your company. Post these up somewhere that everyone in the company can see. These should be words you want people outside the organization to associate with your company. For example, you may choose words like quality and leadership or even words like affordable, responsive, best in class, etc.

It’s best to post these either on large pieces of paper or written on some type of white board.

Now, whenever an employee feels the company has acted or made a decision that they feel is contrary to any of the posted core values, they can remove it. Once a word has been removed it can only be restored when the employee who has taken it down feels their concerns have been addressed and the company is again embodying those qualities.

Should the employee decide not to restore the word, the company can add other qualities in its place, but can never post that particular quality again.

This may seem harsh, but I assure you, your customers are even less forgiving and word travels fast. If you want a good reputation, you have to earn it. The best way to earn it, is to be it.

Today’s image by fakelvis - http://www.flickr.com/photos/lloydm/2305701220/