Connecting People: The Key to Customer Centric Leadership

Over the last 22 years, I have worked in and with businesses of all shapes
and sizes, across multiple industries, all around the world. I secured my
very first full-time job in the financial services industry in 1995. Among
others, I was interviewed by the company chairman and the managing
director. At the time, as a naïve young man entering the workplace for the
first time, I had no comprehension as to how significant it was to be
interviewed by the two most senior people in the business. Granted, the
company was small, with only around 150 employees, but little would I know
how unusual these two men were to become in my work experiences going
forward.

Two years later, I moved on to my second role, a promotion into one of the
UK’s biggest corporates – The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). I was
delighted. To get this job, I was interviewed by the man who would become
my boss. I was not interviewed by the chairman… or the CEO… or anyone
with a fancy job title for that matter. I was recruited for the role of
auditor by the audit manager.

I worked for a division of RBS called Royal Bank Invoice Finance. In my two
years there, I do not recall ever meeting a member of the board of
directors. I cannot tell you who the CEO was — I am pretty sure I did not
even know that at the time. I would have had even less of an idea who was
running RBS itself.

Leadership-Employee ‘Misconnection’

As my career progressed and I moved into bigger roles in different
organisations, the gap between people in the businesses I worked for seemed
to grow. However senior I seemed to become, the less connected to
leadership I appeared to be. This phenomenon was particularly prevalent in
the financial services businesses I worked in.

The growing ‘misconnection’, as I started to describe it, took a turn for
the better when I started working for General Electric (GE). I have written
many times before about my view of Jack Welch and his brand of
‘transformational leadership’. For the second time in my career (after my
very first job), I could see exactly what the leadership of a business
‘stood for’ – ironically, it was one of the biggest companies in the world.
It was refreshing. Inspiring. Motivating.

I left GE four years later full of energy, hope and ideas. I was excited
about the future. I had been led brilliantly for those years by inspiring
people who worked hard to connect people – to connect their people to the
purpose of the organisation. Everyone had a strong sense of who we were;
why we were doing the things we needed to do; and the direction that we
were going in. It resonated so well with me, that I thought every business
I would work with in the future would be the same.

They were sadly not.

Fast forward to 2017. I have spent the last five years working with
companies – not as an employee, but as a consultant. I am remarkably
fortunate to see so many different business environments in a very short
space of time. In the last five years, I have worked with 67 companies.
There are many common traits among them – whichever industry they may have
been in. The most common trait of all though, brings me back to the
phenomenon I first experienced at RBS – the phenomenon of the
leadership-employee ‘misconnection’.

Time and time again, I am immersed into companies that have a noticeable
gulf, gap, chasm — call it what you will — between leadership and
employees. Companies that possess talented, passionate people, who are open
to and acknowledging of the need for continuous improvement. People who
want to learn and become even better than they are today. People who seem
to completely ‘get it’ — the need to become ever more customer centric to
enable sustainable business growth.

Yet these people seem to work with
leadership who are so far removed from their way of thinking, that they are
living in a parallel universe!

It is more common than not to find businesses in 2017 whose employees have
little sense of the following:

• What the business purpose is
• What the business ambition is
• What the business strategy is
• What the customer strategy is – or if there even is one
• How the business is performing – financially and from the customer
  perspective

These businesses tend to be the ones whose people are not allowed to think.
People who are employed to fulfil tasks that have been identified
by leadership as being necessary to meet the purpose, ambition and strategy
of the business, that only they are aware of.

It may seem as though I am being extreme in my description – but I can
assure you that what I am describing is far more common than not. The
misconnection between leadership and employees around the world is growing.
At a time when there is increasing recognition of the need to put people –
customers AND employees – at the heart of any strategy to drive sustainable
business growth, this is a sad and startling issue.

Leadership Imperative

What can be done to recreate the connection? One of the reasons I am
writing about this subject is to highlight just how important it is. Those
who are privileged to lead businesses and the people who make them tick,
need to look at themselves, long and hard, in the mirror. They need to ask
themselves – do my people know who I am? Do they know what I stand for? Do
they know what I am trying to achieve?

If they cannot answer these
questions in the affirmative, they have a problem – a big problem – that
will not only affect their ability to achieve whatever their strategic
business goals may happen to be, but that will determine their legacy.
There are so few truly transformational business leaders that can be named
– this article is highlighting why.

Connecting people is, in my opinion, the key to customer centric
leadership. A customer centric leader understands people. A customer
centric leader knows what it feels like to be a customer, and also knows what
it feels like to be an employee — on the front line, in the back office and
on the board of directors. A customer centric leader is an empathetic
leader, one who intuitively knows the importance of everyone recognising
the direction of travel and who can support them on the journey.

In my very first job, I had just that. I will never again take for granted
how inspirational they were and how much they have influenced the rest of
my career.