I was working with a major industrial good company a couple of years ago whose CEO decided the company needed to become more customer-focused. This, he told me, had become his top priority. But despite letting the company’s employees know that ‘Customers Are #1,’ he wasn’t seeing evidence of that. He wanted my advice.
Rather than give him a lecture or a pep talk, I made a request; I asked to see the 12 most recent executive committee meeting agendas.
He didn’t understand why I wanted them, but he asked his assistant to make copies for me anyway. Not surprisingly, there was time built in to discuss Finance, Budget, Sales, Quality, Safety, Legal matters and other standard fare. Customers were never mentioned. Not once.
How can you expect your organization to be customer-oriented when the leadership isn’t customer-oriented, I asked?
He had no answer, of course, and was even, I think, slightly embarrassed. But it was an “aha” moment. He understood—and placed “Customers” on the top of the next meeting’s agenda, with a specific request that the discussion should focus on the company’s relationship, one by one, with its 10 largest customers. [The next meeting, for the record, focused on numbers 11 to 20.]
The CFO saw this and asked the controller: What can you tell me about those customers? The controller called the head of sales and asked the same question, which also was being asked by other executives and department heads, up and down the line. The word was out: leadership is serious about this.
From that point on, every meeting included a discussion of customers. The CEO then started to invite customers in for visits with the leadership team every second month. Members of the leadership team were told to get out of their offices more. Ride around; visit with customers; come back and tell us what you learned.
It was a kind of shock therapy—but over time the entire organization became more outwardly focused.
When culture changes such as the one described above are needed, too many organizations attempt to force the issue. They send a small subset of employees on a two-day off-site retreat. The employees brainstorm the ideal new culture by writing words on sticky notes, which the facilitator posts on a white board. They discuss the various concepts, then narrow the options by voting on the ones they consider most appropriate: “nimble,” perhaps, or “agile,” “purpose-driven,” “balanced,” “entrepreneurial,” “team-oriented,” “inclusive,” “innovative,” “focused.” Then they go home, energized and maybe even excited, mission accomplished.
Senior management makes the final selection, announcing the new mantra with posters, wallet cards, and an internal email letter from the CEO to all “Team Members,” since “team-oriented” was one of the buzzwords chosen to describe the desirable new culture.
And then you know what happens next: not much. Weeks and months go by and little if anything changes. Some are still talking the talk but virtually nobody’s walking the walk.
We all know in our guts, from experience, and from the dizzying array of articles, surveys and studies on the subject—a recent Google search of the words “corporate culture” produced 675 million results (that’s correct, 675,000,000)—that an organization’s culture is critical to its success.
There are certainly a number of steps you can take to prompt needed changes, as Todd Alexander discusses in this Leadership Research Institute publication.
But it won’t happen without strong leadership. As Alexander notes, “Words don’t change a culture. Displaying … company values in impressive lobby displays, or imprinting mugs, mouse pads, note pads, or key chains with the [company’s] values might be nice reinforcement, but these things do not define or change a culture.”
Culture change comes from concrete and noticeable changes in leadership behavior: what they do; who they hire; who they ask to move on; who they listen to and emulate; where they spend their time; what they talk about in meetings; what they measure; how they invest the firm’s money.
If you want your company to become more customer-oriented, get to know your customers better. You can’t do that sitting at a desk all day.
Sticky notes and posters won’t change a company’s culture. What’s needed is a leadership team that’s committed to change, points the company in the right direction, sets the tone, establishes expectations, and leads by example.
Grant Freeland is a Boston-based senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).