CX Competency: Purposeful Leadership (Video)

Temkin Group has found that the only path to sustainable customer experience differentiation is to build a customer-centric culture. How? By mastering Four Customer Experience Core Competencies.

This video provides an overview of one of those competencies, Purposeful Leadership, where the goal is for leaders to act consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values.

Here are the Five P’s of Purposeful Leaders:

Customer Obsession Lessons From Amazon.com’s Bezos

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos recently sent a letter to shareholders sharing his view on how Amazon would avoid what he calls “Day 2,” because…

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.  

I’ve shared the full letter below, but want to share my thoughts on Bezos’ four themes he shares for avoiding Day 2:

1. True Customer Obsession: Obviously this theme completely resonates with me. I love the line… “Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.” My take: Companies need to look for the unchartered white space, and innovate at the intersection between customers’ latent needs and emerging capabilities.
2. Resist Proxies: Bezos calls out “process” and “surveys” as proxies to watch out for. Process is an issue because it can reinforce compliance and complacency, instead of empowering individuals to drive innovation.  Surveys are an issue, because they can provide employees with a superficial understanding of customers. Deep insights into what people like, love, and dream about aren’t fully answered with percentage points. My take: You need to create deep customer empathy, not just statistically significant charts and metrics. Find ways to include more qualitative research.
3. Embrace External Trends: Amazon will likely be more adept at grabbing the “tailwinds” of trends than most companies, but it’s critical for all leadership teams to keep an eye on how the world is changing. That’s why we issue our annual listing of CX trends. I was also very intrigued by Bezos’ discussion about easy access to Amazon’s “deep learning frameworks.” An API that taps into Amazon’s rich analytics backbone could be much more exciting than even IBM’s Watson. My take: Every organization should identify a set of key trends and ask the question: “How will these put us out of business or help us to create even more value to customers?”
4. High-Velocity Decision Making. Bezos discusses three elements of his leadership philosophy. First of all, treat many decisions as reversible, so that you are creating an option — not just putting all your chips on a single approach. Second, is to get comfortable with making decisions without full information. Thirdly, he talks about “disagree and commit” which means that everyone needs to get in line when a decision has been made. Finally, he wants true misalignment to be identified and dealt with immediately. Nothing kills a culture more than lingering, unaddressed issues. My take: It’s smarter to get moving and learn along the way (see my post Modernize Leadership: Learn and Adjust).

The bottom line: Every leadership team should proactively avoid Day 2.

Sadly Saying Goodbye to Pete Winemiller

I just heard that Pete Winemiller passed away, and it hit me hard. I knew that he had been battling cancer, but I thought that he was winning the fight. How could he not? Pete was one of the most positive people that I’ve ever met. The world lost a wonderful man… and a true customer experience trailblazer.

Pete was the Senior Vice President, Guest Relations for the NBA’s OKC Thunder. His work on customer experience focused on the people who were interacting with fans. Not just employees of the Thunder, but all of the people from all of the partners who played some role in the fan experience, including concessions, parking, ticketing, maintenance, and even the police force.

I actually was privileged to give Pete and his team two different CX awards. In 2012, the Thunder earned Temkin Group’s CX Excellence Award. When Pete heard that they had won, he immediately asked if we could provide multiple versions of the award to give to his partners. He brought his partners out during the half-time of a game to share the award with them.

In 2014, the Thunder won a CXPA.org CX Innovation Award. Pete flew in to accept the award and I gave it to him on stage. He was a big man who had a huge, warm handshake. As with all of his accolades, he wanted to share the award with all of the Thunder partners. In November of 2014, I went to OKC with my daughter to participate in the halftime ceremony (I’m on the left and Pete is next to me).

I really enjoyed that visit (you can read about it here). It was great to see Pete operate. He seemed to know the names of all the people who were working at the game. As he walked around the stadium, he was both a cheerleader and a stickler for quality. In his wake, he left a highly engaged workforce, most of whom were only part-time employees.

Pete was a great example of a purposeful leader. He operated with a clear, well articulated set of values. As a result, all of the employees who affected the fan experience delivered on the OKC Thunder’s five service principles (acronym CLICK!):

• Communicate courteously
• Listen to learn
• Initiate immediately
• Create connections
• Know your stuff

We regularly interviewed Pete as part of our research, so you will see snippets of the OKC Thunder’s efforts in may of our reports. One of the most detailed overviews of Pete’s work can be seen in our 2013 report, Lesson in CX Excellence (download for free using the code “ThanksPeteW“).

The world lost a true CX trailblazer and a great human being. I’ll miss him.

R.I.P. Pete.

An Ugly Uber Lesson In Organizational Culture

In a recent Fast Company article, This Is What Caused Uber’s Broken Company Culture, Uber was described as having a…

“Hobbesian environment” where “workers are pitted against one another and where a blind eye is turned to infractions from top performers.”

While I haven’t investigated Uber’s actual culture, it’s worth examining what could have caused this type of an environment in one of the fastest growing Internet companies. To be fully transparent, I’m an Uber customer who is thrilled with how the company has transformed the taxi experience.

My take: Culture is frequently neglected. Why? Because it often doesn’t seem to show up until there’s a problem. That’s what happened at Wells Fargo, and it is also what appears to have occurred at Uber. Very few leaders set out to create a dysfunctional culture, but they exist in many places.

Every organization has a culture, whether its leaders explicitly attend to it or not. It represents how employees think, believe, and act:

• Think: Employees are intellectually bought-in and understand the company’s vision and why it is important to the company. What is the company communicating?
• Believe: Employees see that leaders are truly committed to what is important to the company. What are leaders demonstrating with their behaviors?
• Act. Employees adjust their behaviors to align with what is important to the company. What do employees do when no one is looking?

In young companies, organizational culture closely mirrors the attitudes of its leaders. If they care about fast growth at all costs or winning through combat, then that’s the context that frames how employees think, believe, and act. If the company is successful, then the culture tends to be strong, as it is implicitly reinforced by that success.

What does strong culture look like? Picture a cult. Behavior isn’t judged on a normal good/bad scale, but on how well people conform to the tone set by its leaders. Inappropriate behavior such as the sexual harassment alleged at Uber can go unchecked, unless it overtly bumps up against a cultural norm. If alleged allegations of wrong doing are not important to the leaders, then they will not be taken seriously or even acknowledged.

To all of the leaders reading this post, especially those who are running young, fast-growing companies, please stop ignoring organizational culture. You’re responsible for much more than financial results. You’re creating an organization that can hopefully endure and add value to society. So focus on your organizational culture and create a company that you can be proud of for generations.

Wondering how to do it? Read my post: Put Culture Change On Your 2017 CX Agenda. Here’s How. 

The bottom line: Organizational culture really, really matters!

Podcast: Purposeful Leadership With Tom Feeney, Safelite CEO

As part of Temkin Group’s celebration of 2017 as The Year of Purpose, I interviewed Tom Feeney, President & CEO of Safelite Group.

Temkin Group defines purposeful leadership as operating consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values. That also describes Tom. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Tom for many years, and believe that he is a great example of a purposeful leader.

While Safelite is by far the largest auto glass repair and replacement company in the U.S., the podcast does not focus on the company’s strong financial growth. Instead, Tom and I discuss Safelite’s purpose statement: Making a difference by bringing unexpected happiness to people’s everyday lives. Enjoy the podcast!

You can also download the podcast

Tom Feeney’s Bio:
Since joining Safelite Group in 1988, Tom Feeney has held several positions within the organization including senior vice president retail operations. In October 1991, Feeney was promoted to senior vice president, client sales and support and again in 2003 as executive vice president and chief client officer with responsibility for Safelite Solutions. Feeney became president and CEO of Safelite Group in 2008 and introduced a new vision for Safelite supported by two core principles: “People Powered, Customer Driven.”

Modernize Leadership: Observe and Improve

In a previous post, I described how today’s management techniques reflect outdated assumptions of technology-enabled practices, human behavior, and the meaning of success. That’s why organizations must shift to what I’m calling Modernize Leadership.

I’m writing individual posts for each of the eight key changes required to modernize leadership. In this post, I’m examining the shift from:

Measure and Track to Observe and Improve

Here’s some more information to better understand this shift:

Outdated Thinking
Here are some ways in which leaders must change how they view the world:

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure. That’s a refrain that I often hear, and it pushes people in the totally wrong direction. The reality is that most things in life are managed without explicit measurements. Think about a typical day. You get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and commute to work without referring to a dashboard of metrics. That does not mean that measurements can’t help, but they hardly ever tell the entire story.
• Managers often look for metrics they can to use to hold people and organizations accountable. Setting measurable goals is not a bad thing, but it can cause bad behaviors. Managers will sometimes overly focus on the metrics and ignore nuances such as actual behaviors of the team and shifts in the situation. They act as  if it’s possible to manage something you don’t truly understand. That all falls apart when the an organization needs to deviate from a “straight ahead” orientation.
• When employees believe that a metric is very important, they are explicitly and implicitly encouraged to do whatever it takes to achieve the goal. This can lead to inappropriate behaviors such as a car salesperson insisting that you give him a “10” on a survey. At Staples, a metric of $200 of add-ons for each computer pushed employees to refuse selling computers to customers who weren’t going to purchase add-ons.

Heres a quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Modernized Leadership Actions
Here are some ways in which leaders should act based on a modernized perspective:

• Look positively forward. Metrics often show how an organization has performed during some previous timeframe, but what you really care about is how it will get better in the future. Make sure that your discussions with people are focused on what the organization can learn in order to  improve, not on blaming people for the problems that caused a poor score.
• Encourage the right behaviors. If you want your organization to make improvements, then nurture the employee behaviors that will deliver better results. So celebrate employees who are doing the right things, even when the metrics aren’t great.
• Build operational empathy. If you want your employees to do the right things, then they should feel as if you know their environment. Rather than having employees just see you commenting on metrics from afar, set aside time to regularly get immersed in different parts of the organization. Ask employees how they think the company can improve. This will help you understand when to “back off” reacting too strongly to the metrics and let employees know that numbers aren’t everything.
• Enable continuous improvement. Instead of using measurements as a pure grading system, use them to identify places for improvement, and always ask: what have we learned and how can we get better? Your organization needs to have an ongoing improvement cycle that is at least at the same pace as your measurement system, otherwise metrics will only lead to frustration.

The bottom line: Observe your organization and focus on improvements.

My 5 Super Bowl Observations (Good For CX and Leadership)

I was very fortunate (as a die-hard Patriots fan) to have attended Super Bowl LI in Houston. It was the most amazing game that I’ve ever seen.

I’m still a bit numb.

After spending most of the game feeling very melancholy and wondering why I had bothered to make the trip to Houston, the Patriots did the near-impossible. They came back to win after being behind by 25 points. At one point in the game, the Falcons had a 99.6% chance of winning!

Here’s my video from right after we won…

Now that it’s been a few days, I can reflect back on the Patriots victory. Here are some of my thoughts that I also think apply to customer experience and leadership:

1. Every player counts. Throughout the Super Bowl, playoffs, and the regular season, different Patriots players made key plays. There are 53 people on an NFL roster and more than 60 people play for the team during a year (with injuries and roster shifts). While many people focus on Tom Brady, the Patriots won because of the performance of all 60+ players. This insight drives how the Patriot’s allot their cap-limited player salaries.
2. Do your job. Throughout the season, the Patriots repeated a mantra: Do Your Job! While it’s always easy to focus on what other people might be doing, or the hype around big games, each player will best influence the outcome if they are physically and mentally prepared. In this environment, players are motivated to prepare and they have trust in their teammates.
3. Focus on the next play. When the Patriots were down 28 to 3, it looked bleak. The players could have put their heads down and pouted about the previous plays, but they didn’t. They went back on the field and did their best on the next play. And then the next play, and the next, and the next. The team’s success was not based on a single play (although Edelman’s catch was amazing). Instead, it came from a large number of next plays.
4. Leadership drives culture. Getting 60+ well-paid athletes to share a common vision, and operate in a consistent manner does not happen by accident. And it’s not practical to micro manage every player’s minute-by-minute activities. This type of alignment only comes from a strong culture, which has been modeled and nurtured by Bill Belichick and the rest of the coaching staff.
5. Live events are special. I’m sure that every Patriots fan watching or listening to the Super Bowl went crazy when we won the game, but there’s something magical about being there in person. The energy that’s created during a live event cant be replicated on TV or radio. It was a truly emotional experience that I shared with 10’s of 1,000’s of my closest Patriots friends. I was also at Super Bowl XLIX in Phoenix, and felt the same massive energy when we beat the Seahawks.

The bottom line: All I can say is… Go Pats!

Celebrating MLK Day in the Year of Purpose

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

In this Year of Purpose, it seems more appropriate than ever to celebrate MLK Day. When Temkin Group evaluates purposeful leaders, we look for someone who operates consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values. MLK was one of the most purposeful leaders in the history of the U.S.

On this MLK day, I hope that you elevate purpose in your life. If you want to see what purpose looks like, here’s an excerpt from MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech:

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exhalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

The bottom line: Follow MLK’s lead and elevate purpose in 2017.

 

Report: Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017

We just published a Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2017. The report provides insights from eight finalists in the Temkin Group’s 2016 CX Excellence Awards. The report, which has 62 pages of content, includes an appendix with the finalists’ nomination forms. This report has rich insights about both B2B and B2C customer experience.

Here’s the executive summary:

This year, we named five organizations the winners of Temkin Group’s 2016 Customer Experience Excellence Award – Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Century Support Services, Crowe Horwath, Oxford Properties, and VCA. This report highlights specific examples of how these companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts have created value for both their customers and for their businesses, describes winners’ best practices across the four customer experience competencies: purposeful leadership, compelling brand values, employee engagement, and customer connectedness. it includes all of the winners’ detailed nomination forms to help you collect examples and ideas to apply to your own CX efforts.

Download report for $195

Here are some highlights from the winners:

Put Culture Change On Your 2017 CX Agenda. Here’s How.

If you’re thinking about improving your organization’s customer experience next year (and why wouldn’t you be?!?), then I hope you are also thinking about some changes in your organization’s culture. As I’ve said many, many times, your customer experience is a reflection of your culture and operating processes. It’s your culture that will sustain any improvements that you make in customer experience.

As I’m sure you know, culture change isn’t easy. People are naturally averse to change. As John Kenneth Galbraith so aptly stated, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Any chance of a successful, purposeful change in your culture needs to focus on the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of individual employees. That’s the foundation of a concept that Temkin Group introduced called Employee-Engaging Transformation (EET). EET is based on five practices: Vision Translation, Persistent Leadership, Middle Management Activation, Grassroots Mobilization, and Captivating Communications.
EET is different than typical top-down, autocratic attempts at culture change. Those efforts either just don’t work, or they create unintended negative elements in the culture.

Here’s an assessment that you can use to gauge your effectiveness at applying EET.

For more information, check out all of our rich content on culture change, starting with these two reports:

• Introducing Employee-Engaging Transformation: Five Practices for Creating Sustainable Change Across Large Organizations
• Creating and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture: Five Case Studies in Employee-Engaging Transformation

The bottom line: Culture change is a necessary ingredient of CX transformation.

Modernize Leadership: Detect and Disseminate

In a previous post, I described how today’s management techniques reflect outdated assumptions of technology-enabled practices, human behavior, and the meaning of success. That’s why organizations must shift to what I’m calling Modernize Leadership.

I’m writing individual posts for each of the eight key changes required to modernize leadership. In this post, I’m examining one of them, the shift from:

Amass and Review to Detect and Disseminate

Here’s some more information to better understand this shift:

Outdated Thinking
Here are some ways in which leaders must change how they view the world:

• Leaders rely on periodic, deep understanding of the business. But the pace of change is increasing, and that point-in-time understanding of the past does not always provide a meaningful view of the future, or even how to compete in the present. Leaders need a more continuous set of insights.
• Leaders often act as if customer insights are difficult to gather, so they periodically ask for a large project to provide a Powerpoint-dump to their executive teams. But current technology allows for more ongoing collection and presentation of insights.
• Customer insights teams are required to focus many of their resources on the needs of the leadership team, providing support for a few key decisions. At the same time, a myriad of decisions across the organization are being made without the benefit of strong customer insights.
• Customer insights teams aim to provide “statistically significant” insights, requiring large datasets and extensive timeframes for collecting data. But it takes only a few datapoints to create actionable insights when they are presented to employees across the business who have more context about the business.

Galileo Galilei, the father of the scientific method, once said:

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Modernized Leadership Actions
Here are some ways in which leaders should act based on a modernized perspective:

• Build a customer insight backbone. Given the state of technology, companies need to stop viewing customer insight as a set of market research projects and see it as a core organizational infrastructure. That’s why companies need to build what we defined in 2010 as customer insight & action (CIA) platforms. The goal should be to enable a continuous flow of customer-insightful decisions.
• Distribute role-based insights. All employees make decisions on a regular basis, and many of those would be improved with a deeper understanding of customers. But distributing a common set of monthly Powerpoint slides is not the answer. Engineering teams, for instance, don’t need the same information as the legal department. Companies must tailor insights for each organization to provide the right information at the right time to fuel the decisions that are being made by employees with different roles.
• Tap into the power of context. While analysis of large datasets may be great, people across an organization can often act on smaller timely nuggets of data. A call center supervisor, for instance, only needs to see one negative piece of customer feedback to kick off a coaching session if she is already concerned about that phone rep. These relevant datapoints fuel what we call contextual insights.
• Raise all employees’ customer-awareness. Since insights can be more easily distributed, leaders should look for ways to tap into the insights in order to make everyone in their organization more aware of (and empathetic to) customers’ needs and perceptions.

The bottom line: Turn customer insight into a continuous, distributed capability.

Wells Fargo: A Lesson in Leadership & Culture Gone Awry

In case you missed this in the news, Wells Fargo is under investigation for opening fraudulent accounts for its customers. During a period between 2011 and 2015, it is estimated that there were as many as 1.5 million deposit accounts and more than half a million credit card accounts opened inappropriately on behalf of customers.

As part of a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren grills Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and makes a few very important points. Stumpf heavily, heavily pushed his organization to cross-sell products, setting a long-term goal of 8 products per household, while the industry average was around three. He regularly touted the increase in products per household (over 6.1) to investment analysts and pushed his organization for the growth to continue.

My Take: Stumpf should resign (or be fired). That sounds abrupt, but let me explain…

In this blog, I often discuss the power of culture. It’s one of the most critical drivers of the behaviors of employees across large organizations. As a matter of fact, Peter Drucker has been credited as saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

Whenever there is a consistent set of widespread actions (good or bad), then the first place you should look to explain them is the culture. One of our Six Laws of Customer Experience is that employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. Clearly at Wells Fargo, cross-selling new accounts to customers was measured, incented, and celebrated.

So Wells Fargo employees acted in ways that were consistent with their environment.  They acted in accordance with the company’s culture. Does that mean that the individuals who did the wrong things should be absolved of their errors? Absolutely not. They were wrong and should face the consequences for their actions. But the acts of individuals are symptoms, while the culture that encouraged those behaviors is the systemic issue.

That gets me back to Stumpf. He created (or at least nurtured) the culture across Wells Fargo, and should therefore be held accountable for the consequences. Let me put it this way, should Victor Frankenstein be held accountable for the damage caused by the monster he created? Of course!

Stumpf was rewarded handsomely for the cross-sell results of the culture he created. It’s now time for him to pay the price for the problems caused by that culture.

The bottom line: Leaders must be more mindful of the culture they create.

 

Modernize Leadership: Learn and Adjust

In a previous post, I described how today’s management techniques reflect outdated assumptions of technology-enabled practices, human behavior, and the meaning of success. That’s why organizations must shift to what I’m calling Modernize Leadership.

I’m writing individual posts for each of the eight key changes required to modernize leadership. In this post, I’m examining the shift from:

Strategize and Plan to Learn and Adjust

Here’s some more information to better understand this shift:

Outdated Thinking
Here are some ways in which leaders must change how they view the world:

• Leaders spend a lot of time with their leadership teams fine-tuning precise strategies and laying out high level plans, hoping that their Powerpoint slides will come to life throughout their organizations. Unfortunately, employees need to make adjustments in order to operationalize elements of any strategy. As a result, many strategies and plans fall apart when those adjustments don’t live up to the original plans. Sometimes leaders can force their organizations to initially come close to delivering on their strategies, but there’s no way to consistently live up to those expectations.
• Leaders amass a lot of information to develop their strategies and plans. Unfortunately, the information they use to make those decisions can often change between the time that they make decisions and when things get rolled out. The pace of change is accelerating in most industries, which shortens the useful lifecycle of the analysis that leads to decisions.
• The improving technology for collecting data and doing analysis is making it easier to more frequently understand what’s happening in most organizations. This makes it much easier to make decisions more frequently, instead of waiting until the annual strategy cycle.

As Winston Churchill once said:

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

Modernized Leadership Actions
Here are some ways in which leaders should act based on a modernized perspective:

• Increase strategic planning frequency. If you make most of your important strategic decisions once a year, then you’re likely losing connection with the marketplace. At least make key strategic decisions on a quarterly basis, and look to get it monthly. The shortened cycles will push you to make learn and adjust a continuous activity.
• Test, test, test. Instead of blindly executing on a large strategic plan that defines a single direction, you need to be constantly experimenting with multiple, smaller ideas. But don’t start this process unless you are committed to actively learn from them and adjust your activities.
• Embrace failures. As you become more nimble in your decision making, you’ll be making more decisions which will lead to a larger number of smaller failures. In most cases, there’s a lot that you can learn from things that don’t work out the way you expected. You have to create a thirst for learning from these situations, and keep from looking for blame.
• Double-down on successes. Part of being better at learning and adjusting is the ability to invest (time, energy, capital, etc) on ideas that appear to have strong potential. You need to be prepared to more aggressively shift resources to activities that show promise, even if it means more quickly closing down some other activities.

The bottom line: You need to learn and adjust more frequently.

Modernize Leadership: Engage and Empower

In a previous post, I described how today’s management techniques reflect outdated assumptions of technology-enabled practices, human behavior, and the meaning of success. That’s why organizations must shift to what I’m calling Modernize Leadership.

I’m writing individual posts for each of the eight key changes required to modernize leadership. In this post, I’m examining the shift from:

Command and Control to Engage and Empower

Here’s some more information to better understand this shift:

Outdated Thinking
Here are some ways in which leaders must change how they view the world:

• Leaders focus on assets such as products, customers, and cash, but don’t fully recognize the true value of employees. In many cases, employees are THE critical asset. As a matter of fact, engaged employees are the start to a virtuous cycle that leads to better financial results. It’s no surprise that companies that significantly outperform their peers financially have 1.6-times the number of engaged employees than do companies that underperform their peers.
• Leaders often act as though the success and failure of their business is based solely on the decisions being made by their most senior people, so they focus a large portion of their time and energy on developing and vetting strategies. But all too often, strategies fail because of a lack of support and follow-through by employees who are unaware of what needs to be done, unable to do what it takes, or unwilling to support the change.
• Leaders often respond to problems by putting in place new processes and stricter rules, while there is no ongoing mechanism for removing or simplifying those elements. Over time, the organization gets bloated with so many rules and regulations that employees feel little ownership for the success of the company. And the company loses its ability to adjust to new situations.

Southwest Airline’s founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher captured thinking about Engage and Empower when he said:

“If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don’t need control. They know what needs to be done and they do it. And the more that people will devote themselves to your cause on a voluntary basis, a willing basis, the fewer hierarchies and control mechanisms you need.”

Modernized Leadership Actions
Here are some ways in which leaders should act based on a modernized perspective:

• Influence better decisions. Leaders need to be less focused on the small number of decisions that they make, and more focused on the myriad of decisions that they influence across their organizations. How can you help employees make better decisions?
• Measure employee engagement. If you measure other assets, why not employee engagement? But only do it if you plan on taking action on what you find. Consider using the Temkin Employee Engagement Index.
• Master the Five I’s. How can you engage employees? Learn and master the five employee engagement competencies:  Inform, Inspire, Instruct, Involve, and Incent.
• Assume positive intent. Instead of trying to keep employees from making mistakes by limiting their span of decision-making, find more ways to enable them to use more of their own judgement. Start by believing that your employees can (in almost all cases) be trusted—and train them.
• Activate middle managers. It’s hard to get any group of employees to change their behavior when their managers are still reinforcing old processes, measurements, and beliefs. When you’re rolling out changes, don’t consider these efforts as being successful until your middle managers are fully on board. This may take some extra work, but the initial investment in time and effort will pay dividends.

The bottom line: Engage and empower your employees.

Modernize Leadership: Steve Jobs Demonstrates Purpose and Values

In a recent post, I discussed how management practices have become outdated and that there’s a strong need to Modernize Leadership. This change requires eight distinct shifts in how we lead organizations.

I just ran into this great video of a speech that Steve Jobs gave in September 1997. It’s really worth watching. Jobs demonstrates a few of the elements that I discuss in Modernize Leadership, and in particular he does a great job of highlighting this necessary shift:

5) Goals and Objectives to Purpose and Values

The bottom line: Tap into your purpose and values to drive simplicity