build leadership!
Businesses are rediscovering the customer! After years of inward-focused, efficiency-driven business practices, where the bottom line was driven by years of inward focus rather than by customers’ engagement, the focus is now shifting. With companies like Apple and Nike thriving on the drive of a business’s savviness and the reactivation of their devoted, happy-spending customers, others want to follow suit. The question remains how to grow a customer base as loyal and motivated as Apple’s: loyalty is not enough; customers also need to spend and motivate others to do the same!
„Loyalty is not enough, customers need to spend a buck and motivate their friends to do the same!“
So how can you make customers stick to your brand, consume what you produce, and advertise on your behalf? You need a strong brand, relevant products, and an experience your customers like to share with others. But it’s not enough to excel in just one of these aspects; all of them need to be spot-on for a customer to return the favor! Therefore, it’s of no use to just focus on the design of your products and services, or to just rework your service rendering, or to simply pimp your brand. It’s not about those individual instruments, it’s the orchestra that counts!
And this is where the issue begins: most businesses are run by administrators! People who are great at managing an individual part of an organization and in making it efficient and effective; people trained to make decisions that administer the organization in making sure it will achieve set targets. Most businesses are run by managers who can manage well, but they can’t orchestrate.
„Most businesses are run by managers who can manage well, but what they can’t do is orchestrate.“
Being a business’s ‚director is not to instruct people to behave according to set rules or to manage them towards given targets. [Try to direct an orchestra that way and you will administer them at best: the result might be a service, but the experience created will unlikely be recommended!] To truly ‚conduct‘ business in the creation of outstanding customer experiences does not require a leader per se, it requires leadership. Leadership is not something executed by one person – it’s merely conducted by one person. Leadership happens when everyone involved in a business is led by a shared understanding of what must be achieved, regardless of their role or status.
This means that leadership is an organizational aspect, a reflection of the connectedness and dissemination of purpose amongst those active therein. Leadership has to be in all for an organization to be led effectively.
„Leadership has to be in all for an organization to be led effectively.“
So what is leading the way within businesses? What is the common understanding that creates purpose? For businesses, there can only be one topic: the customer! The customer is both at the beginning and at the end-point of a value chain: it’s the reason to generate a proposition and the one to return the value through consumption, use, and recommendation. Business value is generated through the top-line delivered by customers; you can’t ‚save‘ your way into prosperity.
So the crucial thing to develop in businesses is a shared view on creating value for the customer: the more an organization is centered on the customer, the more leadership can be applied effectively, the more effective the business will be (assuming it’s already run efficiently). But most businesses have no idea who their customers really are, let alone how much their organization is centered on them. They might know – through employee engagement surveys – that their cantina needs fresher veggies and that incentives are unevenly distributed, but how far the organization is set up to work collectively and effectively to deliver an outstanding customer experience remains guesswork. Yes, you can ask a customer, for instance, through NPS™, and find out how they rate their experience with you. But a customer will point out the issues that went wrong or well in an experience, not the work that was done to create it. Asking a customer is too late; the damage is already done. You’d better ask the organization. You have to find out how ‘fit’ your organization really is, in how far all involved are truly customer-centered.
„Asking a customer is too late; the damage is already done.“
Understanding organizational fitness is crucial to developing strategies and propositions that can capture the customer’s attention and their loyalty (spending!). You can’t win a bicycle race on an old clunker, nor when you are not fit. So if management and design look after the bike’s quality, it’s the CEO’s job to work on the cyclist’s fitness! The CEO has to lead an organization to develop leadership, and the best way to start is to assess where the organization’s fitness stands. Subsequently, you want to identify your strengths and weaknesses and develop a training plan to improve.
Your leadership (fitness) development plan could look like this:
- Fitness test: check the organization’s customer-centricity, using the Customer Centricity Score™
- Interpretation: establish a clear overview of strengths and weaknesses
- Root cause analysis: use a reflection method to find out what drives the symptoms, to understand that what you observe is not where the problem lies
- Improvement plan: use the insights from the reflection to design measures to improve leadership (these are always personal – never they are ready-made recipes)
- Empower change: create the conditions for teams and individuals to follow up on the improvement plans
- Sanity check: compare your view of the organizational fitness with the customer’s view: you will see, there is a correlation!
- Close the loop: check the fitness again (remeasure CCScore™) and engage the organization in a continuous improvement activity
And don’t forget: it’s easy to get a great racing bike, but it takes years of dedicated training to be fit enough to ride it properly!
More information on organizational fitness at www.ccscore.com