The Management Mirror

When customer feedback and research results conflicts with our views or understanding, and aren’t what we expected, they create an uncomfortable feeling of stress. The stress is caused by cognitive dissonance, which our minds quickly work to minimise and resolve.

That happens very quickly. Our natural instincts are to reject or explain the conflict away, or absorb the new information and own it, saying ‘we’re doing that’, or ‘we’ve have started to do that’, or ‘we know that’.

So, it shrinks the gaps between what people did think, and the reality, and reduces the likelihood of feeling the need to improve. An opportunity missed!

But, by capturing what management thinks customers will say, before they see what they did say, MRA’s Management Mirror® eliminates the problem of cognitive dissonance. Companies can therefore clearly see the gaps between what they ‘knew’ or expected and the hard facts.

Over the years we’ve observed that teams who can see and focus on the gaps between what they expected and what customers thought made far bigger and continuous improvements.

Companies who only had customer feedback were unable to reconcile the cognitive dissonance, so found it harder to see and then sustain the motivation to make the changes.

Managers at (the company) complete a survey which replicates the Customer Experience Survey questions so it records at the same time how managers feel customers would answer.

The greatest barriers to advancement in any market are often internal – unacknowledged or unseen bias and groupthink. The Management Mirror reveals both, which is a necessary first step in freeing a company from the factors which limit and hold it back.