The Difference Between Context and Experience

I had quite a few different jobs over the years, in companies of all sizes and across many industries. Each had, or did not have, its own onboarding training, practices, and ideas.

The most enterprise-oriented ones all look about the same. Some canned training from a white-label HR consultant, a few company-specific courses created internally, and then off you go to your own team for more specialized training.

Once, I was hired by a company that had all sorts of unusual practices, from the hiring process to the onboarding. The founder and CEO mandated that, no matter which team or role you were hired for, you had to spend your first two weeks on customer support. Level 1 support, first to reply to a chat conversation.

I don’t think I can stress enough how much I hated those first two weeks. To be honest, I also hated the rest of my time there and left after just a year, but I digress.

Of course, I did not hold back and really tried to be the best customer support agent I could. My mentor for those two weeks gave me great feedback at the end of each day, and I was replying to a little over the required quota for regular support personnel.

I get the idea. The CEO wanted new hires to understand what customers are doing, the problems they face, and how they use the product.

Many years before that, I had experienced something similar, but in a very different way.

I was part of a large team at a company fully dedicated to a major customer. We had our own building, our own networks, a different set of laptops, and even our own phone system.

Since we supported several of their warehouses and distribution centers, they put us all on a bus and drove us a few hours to one of those locations. The site leader walked us through their entire logistics process and, at each step, stopped to explain what kinds of problems they might encounter that would require our assistance, and what the consequences would be if they did not get timely help.

For example, they had government-certified printers used to print shipping manifests for their ice-cream trucks. If one of those printers had a problem, it needed to be fixed in no more than an hour or so. Otherwise, tons of ice cream could melt en route due to the delay, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and causing a cascading supply-chain nightmare.

That was a very necessary reality shock. The default behaviour when seeing a “printer not working” ticket would be to mark it as a SEV3 and deal with it in four business days. In this case, the printer being down was a SEV1.

Again, I get the idea. The client wanted new hires to understand what the end customers were doing and how our work affected theirs.

But this approach was much better.

I remember that everyone, including me, enjoyed the trip very much and came back far more attuned to the problems we were supporting.

Same idea, different approaches, different results.

The CEO assumed that by making everyone do support, they would understand customers. What they mostly learned was what it felt like to be a support agent.

The warehouse visit taught us something different. We did not learn how to operate a forklift, print manifests, or load trucks. We learned why those things mattered.

A few times, I got involved in exercises of this kind at one company or another. Leadership, in many cases, wants the second result using the first approach. And that is doomed to fail.

I have heard arguments like: “How are we going to support our customers if we don’t even know how they use our products?”

This is a net too wide to cast.

It may be completely fine for someone to be a car mechanic without spending two weeks working as a chauffeur. You can be a top speech therapist without giving public speeches.

What matters is not whether you have personally performed every task your customers perform. What matters is whether you understand the consequences of your own work in their world.

The warehouse tour worked because it connected a technical problem to a business outcome. We did not need to become logistics specialists. We only needed to understand that a seemingly insignificant printer failure could stop trucks from leaving a distribution center and spoil thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

That single piece of context changed how we evaluated priorities from that day forward.

Most people do better work when they can see the chain of cause and effect between what they do and the results someone else experiences. The challenge for leadership is not to force employees into every possible role. It is to make those connections visible.

When people understand why something matters, they usually do not need to be told to care. They arrive there on their own.