I’ve been reading Jim Collins‘ Good to Great and it’s a thought-provoking study, based on mountains of empirical research. It discusses what Collins calls the physics of how good companies become great companies, significantly out-performing their competitors. But it’s striking that a number of the key attributes of companies that make the leap from good to great can also be applied to websites and to WCM in particular. In this post I’ll focus on what Collins calls buildup, before moving onto breakthrough.

Level 5 leadership

Collins found that all the top-performing companies he analysed were led by people who combined personal humility with professional willpower. It’s easy to extend these characteristics to websites, where a major barrier to success is vanity. If the website is your “baby” or reflects the parochial concerns of your departmental or organisational structures, it will never be a great website.

While sponsors and stakeholders empire build, or focus too much on the website and not enough on the web as Gerry McGovern points out, you cannot achieve your potential. The message should not be “when I was in my last job, I did it this way”. The message should be “we need to improve, we need to stop doing things badly”. This is a matter of professional integrity and resolve, not a way to boost egos.

First who… then what

If you recognise that you don’t have the skills or time to do everything yourself, you’ll also see the need to be supported by a good team of editorial, information design, creative, technical and project management people. You just need to get them on the bus. If they’re any good and have encountered similar problems before, you won’t need to set directions for them. They’ll see the need to improve and will be able to start advising you where the problems are.

For example, when Contented Management staff go into a project, we don’t expect to be told the big vision or what a project should look like. If you know that already, you don’t need us. You just need a bunch of body-shopping coders to implement the changes. You bring us on board because we sign up to helping you the best way we know how.

So don’t decide where the bus is going before the right people are on board. A strong team can set a common vision; whoever came up with the idea in the first place is immaterial. If the idea is right, everyone should buy into it and pursue it relentlessly, just wanting to be a part of a website they can be proud of having helped to develop.

Confront the brutal facts

Above all, the common vision needs above all to be well-informed. There’s absolutely no point in speculation. Collins talks about the importance of a climate where the truth is heard.

Many people just want to know what’s convenient: that your WCM is a great platform for managing content, that it’s robust and performs well, that the users love it, that the websites it generates are standards compliant, that your projects follow best practice methodologies, and so forth. The reality may be quite different, but how do you find out?

Collins proposes four ways to get to the truth:

1. Lead with questions, not answers.
   Hopefully previous posts on requirements will give you some indication of what you should be asking, but I think an important point here is that people won’t simply accept the truth just because you tell them it’s staring them in the face. Site owners may tell you that they have high bounce rates, where visitors come to a single page and then leave again, because they’ve found all the information they need on that one page. But is that really what’s required? What about cross-selling opportunities, or more complete views of the information, or suggested further reading? Do none of your visitors want those things?
2. Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
   Just because there are standards out there, doesn’t mean you have to use them. A CMS can compel editors to display their content in certain formats, but there’s not much point if the editorial team doesn’t buy into it. Discuss how your audiences consume your content now and how you want them to consume it in future. If you choose to standardise, do so because your stakeholders agree with the obvious benefits. But give yourselves some leeway, so that stakeholders can have a non-standard feature if they can prove its business case.
3. Conduct autopsies, without blame.
   Undoubtedly one of the toughest things to do is to figure out why something went wrong. I’ve had assessments carried out on the projects I’ve run, and I’ve had to run many reviews of failed projects that someone else has been responsible for. But how many projects ever run smoothly?
   You need to accept that things are going to go wrong and that a collective effort is required to put them right again. We prosper and suffer together. If a person makes a mistake, someone else should be there to support them.
   This brings us back to leadership style. Fixing problems is a matter of professional integrity, not of ego-bashing. And if the right people are on the bus, they should be looking out for each other.
4. Build “red flag” mechanisms.
   Being able to confront the brutal facts depends on having the facts in the first place. I’m going to talk about Key Performance Indicators at a later date, but you need to know when something is going wrong as soon as possible. This could be lack of site traffic, high drop-off rates, people preferring other information channels (such as print, or even call centres!), difficulties in estimating and planning enhancements, high costs… anything associated with running a website.
   One of the first tasks you’re going to have before you embark on real improvements to your web environment is to be able to determine just where things are going wrong, so you can either fix them or abandon that activity entirely.

As Collins repeatedly notes, great companies don’t focus principally on what to do, they focus equally on what not to do and what to stop doing. If you get this right, you’ll get the breakthrough, which I’m going to cover in the next post.