One of my best pieces of advice when you’re first starting out as a leader is to gain as much insight into as many roles and responsibilities in your company as possible. Better still: actually assume as many of these roles or tasks as you can, at least for a set time.
Not only will this help you truly understand the multifaceted nature of your business, your team, and your customers, but it will unlock greater efficiencies, make your employees’ work easier, and help you uncover the leadership style that works best for you.
Some leaders are visionaries, able to set forth a long-term vision and empower others to achieve it. Others are integrators, holding their organization’s people, processes, systems, priorities, and strategies firmly together. I believe the best leaders are a combination of both: using their abilities to strategize and orchestrate to keep people (employees and customers) at the heart of everything they do.
History has a long list of CEOs working to understand their businesses from the ground up. Doug McMillon, the president and CEO of Wal-Mart, learned about the importance of seamless operations when he worked at a local distribution center loading trucks. Howard Schultz and Laxman Narasimhan, two former CEOs of Starbucks, learned about the importance of stellar customer service and employee engagement when they worked as baristas.
Before I became co-CEO of Marshall Building & Remodeling, I had the opportunity to step into a variety of roles at my family’s business. I answered phones, set up client appointments, went on sales calls, and conducted site visits, often cleaning up alongside my crews, which was as much about supporting my team as it was about ensuring the best outcomes for the customer. I interviewed clients and wrote feature articles explaining why they chose us to handle their home remodeling projects. When our construction supervisor and office manager were each recovering from surgery, I took over their responsibilities, providing the chance to gain firsthand experience in critical growth sectors of the business.
Every single one of these experiences helped me piece together and articulate exactly what made our company so special. They also helped identify much-needed improvements, especially surrounding digital transformation. Ultimately, this “boots on the ground” exposure helped me understand the dire importance of delivering a stellar experience—for customers and employees.
Customer experience can make or break a company, and the stakes are getting higher. One survey found that 86% of consumers will leave a trusted brand after only two poor customer experiences. Bad customer experiences could cost organizations around the world $3.7 trillion annually, according to research by Qualtrics.
This impact extends to employees as well. For instance, Gallup research found that disengaged employees cost U.S. companies an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost productivity last year. The same study found that only 33% of employees were engaged, a further decline from past years.
While there’s no magic bullet for boosting customer satisfaction and employee engagement levels, I believe leaders must go to great lengths to understand exactly what their customers and employees are experiencing and expect to lead with true empathy and authenticity every day.
I recognize that stepping into every role at a company may not be realistic or attainable for all leaders, but it’s really less about being able to do every role, and more about understanding what’s necessary to be successful in each one, and how to create teams of experts that can also work well together within and across your organization.
Here are a few ways to gain this level of insight.
Be a fly on the wall
One of the most effective things you can do as a leader is to keenly understand what your people are doing. Observing how they work, how they handle challenges, and how they talk to each other (and your customers) can unlock valuable learnings. At the same time, it’s critical to do so in a way that your employees feel comfortable. Develop trust and rapport with your staff, so they know you’re there to learn and support, not to judge their performance.
Be the voice of the customer
The importance of understanding and mapping your customer journey cannot be overstated. When you understand every touchpoint and emotion felt, you can deliver the wow factor modern customers demand. At my company, this meant regularly engaging with customers to find out why they chose us, what they enjoyed about their customer experience, and where we could improve. For years, I personally spoke to every customer to hear their feedback at the end of their project and used it to identify gaps to bridge in the future.
Create space to think
As a leader, you’re probably pulled in many different directions and make innumerable decisions about how to grow and scale your business. It’s natural to feel the need to take swift action to set your business up for the greatest possible levels of success. But it’s equally important to carve out time for mindfulness, which can ease overthinking and make way for deeper, creative thinking. I’m a big believer in the idea that preparation meets opportunity.
Before I officially became the CEO of my family’s business, I spent a great deal of time thinking about how I wanted to grow the company and shape and tell our unique brand story. This time and space allowed my ideas to incubate so that I could start executing my vision when I took the CEO role.
Remember these three words: Observe. Understand. Think. When you observe, understand, and think carefully about your customers and employees you will be in a much stronger position to lead authentically and with heart. Taking these actions, you will uncover insights and knowledge that will help you deliver exactly what your customers and employees need.
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