Face of the Company ....

Most of you know that I work in a consulting company. We get to face the client on a day to day basis and our top management keeps insisting that we are the 'face of the company', any interaction with the client is an opportunity and it has to be treated so,We need to put up our best at any given instant, so on and so forth. All these had not sunk in till today.

Today i was part of a presentation made by few members from a reputed company. I was one among the audience.

The first presenter was kind of OK, not all that impressive. Given that the Vice Chairman of the company was part of the audience i expected him to put up a good show. But a lot was desired or expected from him. The presenters who followed him were not great too. This actually made me think about the company. All of a sudden i realised that i was trying to judge a company based on the very few people I had met. I was not sure whether it is right on my part to judge the company based on the few people I interacted with ?

I know the company very well, few of my friends work for this company. During my undergrad days I wanted to be part of this company. So I didn't pass any Judgment on it. But I am not sure whether I would have stopped myself from judging it, if I didn't know the company at all. Assume that the company's name was something like XYZ and Co., would it have made a difference. I think yes, I would have built an opinion and next time anyone would have asked me about it, I would have given my not-so-favouring opinion.

So the question still persists, "Is it right on our part to judge a company based on the people we interact with?"

My hypothesis is that most of us do it. We make opinions or pass judgements based on the people we interact with.

It makes sense to a certain extent. These days almost all companies make tall claims, one cannot distinguish the bad apples from the good ones, untill a deep dive is done. Well no one has the time to do it too. So one makes impressions based on the employees of the organization. Interesting thing is, it is such a fast paced world, one might get very few opportunities to interact with different people from the same organization. So that the balancing between good and not-so-good might not happen, and probably the client might create a not-so-correct opinion about the company.

Now, I understand what the top management in our company mean when they make the sentence, "You are the face of the company". Every word we say, every action we make is passing messages to other people and we need to be watchful of that and probably use it to our own advantage. Good people will always create lot of good will to the company, as its face.

Well, as the popular saying goes, "Face is the index of the mind", we are the index of the company we represent.