This is not that conventional Michael Jordan story about constant failures that led to success—we already heard lots of those before. This column is about how our organization’s constant success unknowingly put us in a very difficult situation.
The organization I am currently connected with is a revenue-collecting government agency under the umbrella of the Department of Finance. It is divided into several districts across the country and the measure of its performance is through annual targets assigned to it.
All throughout my almost four-year stay in my district, we had always been the top performer in the entire country in terms of hitting the quotas. Well, at least before 2019.
Last year, our district received an award of recognition from President Duterte himself for maintaining an excellent performance over the years (so yes, that good.) However, while maintaining an excellent performance has gained our district many recognitions and advantages, it also brought about challenges we did not see coming.
Since the trend of our collection performance has been consistently going up, our quota has escalated as well. For five straight months now, we have failed to deliver our assigned quota. Not only does our performance seem to be going downhill, we are also struggling to put out the fire.
Here, I point out some possible factors that might have been the reasons why our numbers have started to fall short.
We have very tough competition—our own record of success. Our reputation as the collection machine district of the agency has led to high expectations that were translated into high collection targets. It is not until the first half of this year that we realized that the annual collection target we committed to is a little too much. The increase in the volume of transactions is not enough to cover the increase in quota. Meaning to say that even if our numbers are consistently going up (which it is), it is still not enough to meet the high standards being set for us (or in a sense, we set for ourselves).
We got complacent. Districts who failed to hit their targets are being asked by the central office to explain. Being a consistent performer, it is only recently that we were asked to submit such. I was directed by the chief to help construct the said justification report. In my attempt to do so, I encountered difficulties in coming up with a comprehensive explanation because the concrete data to back it up are not that easily accessible. This is a result of not having a good data management system, which is the result of our complacency. If only we had an efficient data management system and practice, we could have had easily accessed data which we can use in analyzing and explaining our performance, as well as in making better and more informed business decisions and strategies.
That is the poison of constant success, we become too complacent that we ignore the importance for constant improvement. It gets us to thinking that “hey, we are doing well, why change?”
We were not proactive. During the course of the investigation on the reasons why we were not able to hit our quota, I discovered that there are processes and practices that remained the same for more than a decade now. I was able to identify issues that have always been hanging out there but were left unresolved due to the organization’s lack of initiative. This is one of the traps of success. An organization can sometimes be blinded by its current achievements that going beyond the usual way of doing business to address potential risks is sometimes taken for granted.
On a brighter side, I am certain that it is not yet late for our organization to save itself from itself. We just recently welcomed a new leadership. Changes have been introduced, and solutions are underway. And since there is a clearer picture of the roots of the issues, projection is now brighter.
Several public consultations through stakeholders meetings are being actively held to address all issues of the clients. Policies and regulations are being revisited and updated when necessary. Other avenues for collection are also being creatively explored.
Through my research and the help of some of my supportive colleagues, we are on our way to proposing an action to improve our data management system.
The organization is now pumping at double-pace, and it had never been this exciting. It goes to show that all we needed is this kind of push to put us back to our senses. We are now seeing improvements in our performance, and if this continues, we are certainly going to be back on our feet in no time.
In conclusion, I would like to stress that this is not just a story about how success could lead to let-downs, but also how identifying its dangers can be a wake-up call and an instrument to get back up twice as strong.
Virome G. Dimasacat is an operations officer and internal quality auditor at a revenue-collecting agency of the national government. He is currently taking his Master of Business Administration at the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He welcomes comments at viromedimasacat@gmail.com. The views expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty and its administrators.