You can manage without domain expertise in service industry

Foreword

I have seen many job advertisements for senior management profiles in the service industry, which generally assign significant weight to "domain knowledge" as one of the key factors for the candidature. With my experience of working across diverse domains and under multiple bosses, I would say "domain expertise is important but is not a quintessential factor in the job description". Having domain knowledge is certainly advantageous but there are ways to effectively manage the business despite not having specific industry knowledge. I have seen senior managers effectively managing the business from day 1 and taking the right business decisions despite being from a discrete domain or industry altogether. It is all about identifying the strength of key resources with domain expertise within the team and conjoining your management skills with their core competencies. In this article, I have tried to outline some basic steps that should be undertaken to manage the business where one lacks domain expertise, and simultaneously gain domain knowledge in the process and over the time.



Basic sequential steps an effective senior executive should follow in the scenario where domain expertise is lacking:



 -          Overview of the business you will be managing: Understand the expectations of your Manager from you. Take the overview of business and understand what you will be managing or overseeing. Note down the key points which might require further understanding, research and extrapolation of your findings. You might want to sit down with your team to comprehend the details and intricacies of the business

 -          Understand the team composition: Understanding the composition of team and areas of business each team is handling is equally important. Meeting the team and interacting with them will certainly add to your confidence and will help in initiating the relationship building process with the team. It is also important for the team to know who you are, what your priorities are and what will be their involvement, as you are their new leader and your actions will have direct impact in their life.
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 -          Understanding the service levels: It is imperative to have thorough understanding of the clients' businesses and the range of services you will be managing for each client, as you will now be responsible for delivering these services. Clear understanding and review of service-level commitments agreed with each client is very important

 -          Understanding the performance results: Be familiar with the service level parameters and comparison with the actual current achievements. It is always important to know where the business stands as far as performance figures are concerned, as these figures signify the health of the business

 -          Understanding the current challenges – People & Customer: Understanding the current challenges of the team as well as the clients will provide you the insight on your priorities in your to-do list. This becomes an important priorityfor any effective manager. I would say "happy team and clients mean you have already won half the battle"

 -          Introductory/exploratory meetings with the clients: This will allow you to hear the "voice of the customer" and what they feel about the current service levels. Understanding their expectations and how you can contribute to achieving those expectations is important. After all, your clients have domain knowledge and would expect you to talk in their language and your plans for delivering all the service level commitments

 -          Involve your team: Involve the team in analysing the current challenges, identifying the best strategies and implementing the strategies. Document the challenges, strategies/action plans, responsibility & accountability assignments and timelines as these will be the blueprints of your new strategy

 -          Communicate the action plans to the employees and customers: It is important to keep the workforce and customers updated with the plans. This will help in gaining their confidence and aligning their efforts with your action plans.

 -          Periodic reviews: Review the progress of the action plans at scheduled review forums with the team. Ensure there is no deviation from the original plan unless there are certain unavoidable factors which might require plan revisits. Communicate the progress to the workforce and customers which will do wonders gaining the confidence

 -          Business-as-usual: Once the whole cycle described above becomes a system, you need not involve yourself in the basic steps as it might lead to micromanaging. But to ensure continual improvement and success of the system, you never completely let go of the review stage, coming to grips with the detail when an aspect of the system is failing.



By now, you will have basic grasp of the business and will start talking the language of the domain you are now associated with.

The true definition of management is free from the term 'domain knowledge' and supersedes it. It entails understanding the challenges, identifying the strength of available resources, concrete planning to face/resolve the challenges, effective implementation methods devised to succeed, and most importantly, transparency with your team as well as clients.