As head of Premier Partnerships at Google, US, Christine Merritt was looking for new ways to improve service and performance. At the Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education program Achieving Breakthrough Service (now titled Transforming Customer Experiences), she explored service delivery models and best practices with an international group of peers. In this interview, she shares how the program helped her identify key actions that her company can take to outperform the competition.
It's very special to be on the HBS campus and receive a four-day slice of what the full-time MBA students are learning. I have participated in many different courses and training sessions over the years, but this program is different because the quality of the instructors at HBS is top-notch. Being in a room with published authors whose work we knew and having them listen to us and engage us in discussion was an unbelievable experience. I had very high expectations, but the HBS professors surpassed them.
At the beginning, everyone was nervous. A lot of people wondered what it was going to be like to live in the dorm. Would it be just like college? But the first night, we realized it was a very comfortable living environment—like a little hotel. Everyone really enjoyed the experience.
I had been expecting a very American experience, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the group was so diverse internationally. That turned out to be one of my favorite aspects of the program. It was beneficial to hear the perspectives of people from different countries and industries.
At the program, we were not just learning for the sake of learning. Rather, we came away with extremely practical things to do in our companies. Each day of the program, I distilled key takeaways and identified specific actions that I wanted to take and wanted my team to take. I'll work with my management team to prioritize needs, assess our performance against those needs, and compare our performance with the competition. Then I want my entire team—including individual contributors—to do what I am calling an entrepreneurial gap analysis. I want them to articulate how they feel about different aspects of their job, and assess how wide their control, accountability, support, and influence are. Once everyone has done that mapping, we can figure out together what the individual and the company need to do to fill those gaps. That is a very practical exercise we can do at our upcoming offsite meeting.
