Your Cadence is Your Credibility
Sears. Blockbuster. Kodak. Nokia. MySpace.
What do they all have in common?
Their cadence was off.
For these brands, they failed to innovate. That’s one of the levels of cadence and when not attended to, can lead to a lot of issues.
Cadence–the speed at which you’re known to deliver results–needs to be prioritized if you want your business successful.
Everyone wants to lead their market, right? Today, we’ll discover how enhancing your business cadence can make that possible.
Why is Cadence so Important?
Most businesses have slow cadences. They don’t iterate fast. They don’t support customers fast. They aren’t agile enough to shift with the market.
Why?
Because most of them are beholden to the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet says adding headcount to the support team is expensive. And customers aren’t likely to cancel subscriptions if they have to wait 15 minutes on the phone. So why fix it?
Spreadsheets are important for the data, but they can never quite capture the full picture. There are human elements that are neglected, specifically customer and employee satisfaction. And the latter is one of the fastest ways to increase cadence.
In the army, we had a phrase: “Speed is security.”
It was drilled into our heads during Infantry training. But while it’s not wrong, it’s often misunderstood.
Speed on it’s own isn’t the end-all-be-all. The consistency at which we can maintain that speed is.
You see, the special operations teams that live by the “speed is security” mantra have done so many reps that they can consistently deliver the same outcome.
So in a way, moving faster limits the number of variables introduced to a problem (bad guys getting a vote), and allows them nearly guarantee a result.
In business, it’s the same thing.
Moving fast often leads to mistakes. But when we’re clear on the process and outcome, and we get our reps in, that consistency, coupled with speed, gives us immense credibility.
To increase cadence, we need to minimize recklessness.
The Levels of Cadence in Business
There are 3 levels of cadence to adhere to in business. Each builds into the next, but all are incredibly important on their own.
Tactical Cadence
The tactical cadence refers to how fast you get individual jobs done.
This includes client delivery and customer support, where it’s often easiest to see.
How different is the experience between a company that leaves you on hold for an hour, then tells you to email a specific department vs. the company that answers immediately and resolves your issue before you hang up?
Someone reading this just said, “Well, we can’t always get to everyone right away, so that’s not fair.”
That’s the point. The companies with a great tactical cadence are thinking about the problem differently.
Companies that will eventually lose are those that say, “well, we can probably wait 10 minutes before the customer gets angry.”
That thinking is incredibly limiting and shows how not-customer-centric you are.
The company that says, “We know we might not get to everyone right away, but let’s do whatever we can to help them as quick as possible.” Those are the companies that will find potential solutions that win over customers for life.
Think Zappos’ return process. I know people who won’t shop elsewhere after experiencing that level of support.
But this article is about cadence, not support. It just turns out that companies prioritizing their tactical cadence deliver better support because that increases their cadence.
Operational Cadence
Operational cadence is the speed at which you handle the inner workings of your business. How fast are items from meetings actioned after the team gets back to work?
When the team decides on a new campaign or offer, how fast are the assets created? How quickly are you testing messaging to see if the offer even resonates?
Imagine if the norm was, “I’ll have that by end of day,” vs. “I’ll have that by end of week.” What would your organization look like?
(And for some of the skeptics, you can do this without breaking your team.)
Your operational cadence dictates how fast you can get a result, and comes down to the culture you’ve established within the organization.
I define culture as the standard everyone willingly holds themselves to. It’s set solely by the team’s leader, and is the basis for everything the team does or fails to do.
A strong operational cadence syncs all your teams and has them moving deliberately to ensure everything is in place for the tactical cadence to be maintained.
For example, while the tactical cadence could refer to how quickly an individual support ticket is managed, the operational cadence demonstrates how fast action is taken inside the business to document that issue for other customers, tweak parts of the product if necessary, and disseminate any information about the issue across the team.
Teams that maintain a fast operational cadence are powerhouses.
Strategic Cadence
The final level of cadence is strategic. This refers to how fast the entire organization can respond to changing market conditions or other possible challenges.
This is where the companies in the introduction failed. The market was going one direction and they couldn’t keep up. For most, they made a bet the industry wouldn’t change. Obviously, that didn’t pan out as hoped.
In a letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos had described the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 decisions.
Type 1 decisions are like a one-way door. You have to be deliberate in the decision-making because there’s no coming back from your final choice.
Type 2 decisions are like a two-way door. You can make these decisions fast, and should, because if they don’t work out, you can go right back to what you were doing.
To improve your strategic cadence, you need to be very good at making decisions. Decision-making is the most important skill for leaders, and the fruits of this skill often include a faster strategic cadence.
Improving your Cadence
There are hundreds of ways to improve your cadence, so I’m not going to get into them all.
What I will do is point out the three things you can start right now to get on track.
1. Adopt a Mindset that Promotes Cadence
Remember, it’s not just about speed, it’s about consistency.
So when you take on the mindset that you’re going to improve your cadence, you’re paying attention to all the variables that could impact it. You’ll find ways to remove blockers and enhance performance that weren’t obvious before.
2. Understand Your Core Numbers
When you know the critical numbers for your business, you’re able to track and prioritize around them.
This doesn’t mean to look only at the numbers, but rather to have a way to check in on performance.
You need to measure something to improve it, but you can’t measure it unless it’s defined.
So define the core numbers and explain why they’re important to the business. This will help you rank order the tasks to increase cadence from most impactful to least.
3. Find Tools to Help
Once you have the mindset and the skill set, all that’s left is the toolset to make your life easier.
There are hundreds of tools to help you do things faster. The challenge that many companies face is believing a tool will solve your problems.
Having a high-speed CRM doesn’t mean you’re going to magically have great marketing campaigns, but it does enable you to if you deploy the right skills and thinking.
Building your Credibility
In a world that never slows down, your cadence is your credibility. Speed is a competitive advantage.
Prioritize the three levels of cadence in your business and you’ll see immediately results.
And if you want to discuss how you can increase cadence within your organization, you can always shoot me a DM through Substack and I’ll see how I can help.