Who are the most important people in your business?

The Harvard Business School service/profit link case study from the late 1990s transformed my thinking from the widely held belief that customers are the most important people in business. It evidenced it is actually 'those who serve customers'. The role of everyone else in an organisation is to support the customer facing teams so they feel able & empowered to deliver exceptional service. Traditional hierarchies create bureaucratic 'chains of command' that frustrate, slow down & stifle those who interact directly with customers.

From that point forwards, I always inverted the traditional organisational hierarchy, placing customers at the top and those who served customers next.

The GiFT was simple. To deliver great service & performance, the team needed to be highly engaged, feel really good about themselves, energised about what we wanted them to do & feel supported in their ability to do it. Great leaders are great communicators in terms of sharing what really matters and why it really matters to ensure those who are in regular customer contact (in whatever form that takes) have real understanding. They are also able to set up systems and forums to receive feedback at speed from customers AND those who interact regularly with them. This avoids a remoteness and sense of disconnect. I still see and hear of too many businesses where the senior leaders are viewed as sitting in their ‘ivory towers’ ill-informed of frontline sentiment and insight.

My Mozart time (see earlier article), led me to translate these learnings from the HBS case study into 4 simple and connected words: Morale - service - sales - winning.

This became my virtuous circle of success & many of my leadership practices grew from this simple but powerful model.

Feel free to replace any of the words for ones that work in your own environment once you understand my simple and practical thinking.

Although motivation is intrinsic, I worked relentlessly on 'rules of motivation' creating a praise, recognition & celebration culture where everyone felt they could win by achieiving their personal bests. Every effort was made to create clarity about what mattered most & reduce bureaucracy to ensure people felt empowered to help customers in their moments of need. It was a tough culture for those with a victim, cynic & spectator mindset as we worked hard to get 'the wrong people off the bus.' This is a strong motivator in itself - people see leaders taking action with those who are not team players, who are negative & constantly moaning. I also found that leaders who are willing to listen and who seek to understand create a tone, environment and culture that is conducive to people wanting to create change and drive continuous improvement.

A key part of leadership communication is listening.

People who feel really good about themselves have a high level of self-belief and confidence. They bring positive energy to everything they do and it translates to all those around them including their customers.

Overtime this leads to a high quality, consistent service. You create 'Raving Fans' (thanks Ken Blanchard) who tell others about you. The higher the level of service, you sell less, the customer buys more (& recommends you to others) as they trust and love doing business with you. Ultimately you 'win.' The business performs ever stronger & team members win both big & small, starting with praise from their colleagues/customers/leaders to extra training and responsibilities to the material factors like payrises, promotions and bonuses. People also go home at night feeling better and better about themselves, which is a real win in itself.

The more you win, the better you feel, the better you feel, the more positive impact you have on customers who do more business AND tell more people about you. The virtuous circle goes round again & again.

It all starts with understanding who are the most important people in your business and why.