Every few weeks someone is espousing the virtues of being customer-centric as if it is a breakthrough winning strategy. Customer excellence has worked for centuries and will continue for many more. Agile leaders are an essential part of being customer-centric.

Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” — Richard Branson

Business 4.0 = Industry 4.0 + Customer 4.0 + Employee 4.0

As we migrate into Industry 4.0, organizations cannot afford to lose sight that:

• Customers see companies as a means to an end for them. Brand loyalty is diminishing. In the Age of Personalization Customer 4.0 demands personalized care.
• We are in the early days of the Purpose Economy and the Age of Personalization. The core narrative of the workplace is Employee 4.0 needs a higher sense of meaning and purpose in work.

Customer 4.0

A world that is led by customers who are increasingly outcome-driven. Organizations need to be able to pivot to their empowered customer’s evolving demands quickly.

Employee 4.0

To win the war for talent,  businesses need to attract and keep the talent they need to grow. Organizations need to embrace a new talent philosophy based on fulfillment in the workplace. Fulfillment comes through purpose and meaning of work. These are new sources of innovation.  This shift needs:

• “humanizing” work in the digital age
• psychological safety in the workplace
• corporate well-being programs
• the concept of bringing one’s “whole self” to work
• thought diversity and inclusion

Insights from agile leaders

In a recent survey of 500 leaders from across a range of companies and sectors found a strong correlation between agile characteristics and financial performance. The businesses with the highest levels of financial performance are:

• more likely to have agile leaders in the C-suite
• customer-centric
• co-creating processes with customers
• listening and empathizing with their customers
• continuously re-prioritizing offerings, delivery methods, and customer engagement

These are all attributes of agile leaders.

The top ten percent of financial performers are 30 percent more agile than the rest. So, what can the high-performing organizations that are led by agile leaders, teach us about the importance of becoming customer centric?

Behavioural Competencies of An Agile Leader

• Sustains profits — Seeking profitability and personal wealth with a keen sense of risk in order to achieve financial success.
• Seeks Innovation — Thinking expansively and demonstrating intense imaginative insight to identify wise but innovative solutions.
• Embraces Change — Being responsive and open-minded in unpredictable times with a willingness to adapt to rapid change.
• Thrives In Chaos — Enthusiastically thriving under seemingly a chaotic demand and overlapping priorities. Displaying a preference for multi-tasking.
• Focus on Results — Making personal sacrifices and expending extraordinary dedication and work ethic for one’s career.
• Drives Achievement — Desiring to achieve exceptional results under competitive scenarios for high ambition’s sake.

Include customers in your innovation process

For agile leaders, innovation starts with co-creation. This method helps organizations understand why people are looking for certain things. They determine the external factors that are influencing those decisions. These insights inform the entire product or service design process.

The survey found that 46 percent of agile leaders encourage customers to play an active co-creation role in the innovation. They also similarly engaged customers in their service improvement process.

The process of co-creation goes beyond traditional market research tools (i.e., surveys, net promoter scores, and questionnaires). Agile leaders gain insights by using social media to connect with their customers when testing new product or service ideas. They learn real feedback. Moreover, their organization is receptive to user feedback for ongoing improvement.

Their employees have customer excellence in their behavioural DNA. These team members advocate for the customer when internal policy and processes get in the way of excellent service. The agile leader encourages and rewards this behaviour.

At the other end of the continuum, organizations run day-long workshops with customers to get in-depth feedback in-person. The process is targeted at unearthing what their customers want. If you wish to underperform by 30 percent, then follow this approach.

Leverage technology gather to customer feedback

Engagement with your customers is an ongoing process. Over half of the agile leaders had the means to gather regular feedback from their customers. More importantly, they focused both before and after launching a new product or service. Agile leaders foster a listening culture — with customers and employees. Your frontline customer staff no the issues inside and out. Establish regular feedback sessions on what your folks are experiencing. Listen intently provides amazing real-time feedback.

Learning feedback is much simpler customer feedback. You need to determine if you are delivering on your promise. It would be best if you found out their unmet needs. The agile leader interprets behavioural data to understand if their efforts are leading to the desired outcomes. Also, are they are affecting customers as intended?

There has been tremendous growth in analytics. However, most companies are only analyzing about five percent of their data. Agile leaders leave no stone unturned. They are uncovering insights in unexplored data. Agile leaders look at data openly to see if they can find the latest trends. By adopting this approach, you can drive better decisions for your organization. A technology-enabled approach to customer feedback is essential for success. You can grow beyond being a differentiator to a sector leader.

Rank customer goals with data

Once they have customer feedback, the agile leader regularly makes evidence-based decisions. They look for ways to concentrate on customer goals in real time. They have a process to pivot quickly.

Agile leaders have a unique ability to continuously re-prioritize products and services. Their evidence-based decisions are driven by data analysis of changing customer goals and demands. They are expert at execution to deploy their insights. The day of an annual plan is gone.

Doing so at pace is what sets the cohort apart. Today, business leaders believe they need to run 30 percent faster to remain competitive. There is a growing emphasis on quicker cycles of data-rich experimentation, analysis, and adaption. The organizations with the ability to change gears without losing momentum are the ones that will succeed.

VUCA — the reality in Business 4.0

Globalization is driving both opportunity and upheaval across social, political, environmental and business realms. Today’s organizations need diverse leaders. The military acronym, VUCA, captures it well: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.

In a VUCA world, there is a need to shift leadership behaviour and performance at the board and executive level. Agile leaders deliver a more agile strategy.

Many organizations are weak on leaders who have a behavioural performance propensity to proactively drive strategy. Leaders need to work differently in Business 4.0. The environment is increasingly uncertain and volatile.

We have prioritized the following specific characteristics of leadership performance to address today’s business challenges:

• Comfort with prompt high-risk strategic and operational decision making
• Core strength in six agile leadership performance competencies
• Ability to accurately find and develop true high potential talent who can perform at an elevated level in an uncertain and volatile marketplace
• Understand of the critical strengths and developmental opportunities of individuals and teams
• Capacity to drive and sustain cultural and organizational shifts while prioritizing attracting, keeping, engaging, and developing key high-performance talent

Six Reasons CEOs Fail

The main arguments used to explain success or failure concern the CEOs’ behaviours. Especially agile leadership characteristics, such as passion, risk-taking and tenacity. The failures are thought to be due to simple incompetence, rigidity, hubris, or narcissism. These traits that made the CEOs deaf to the changing world around them.

The above hypothesis is a myth — it is much more complicated. The CEO’s success or failure can be ascribed to context. Here are six factors that contribute to the CEO’s success or failure,

The tendency to grow stale 

Research shows that the longer a leader stays in the top job, the lower the returns to shareholders. New CEOs, on the other hand, tend to be more open to change and gain more profits. The fact that the average S&P 500 CEO tenure length has fallen to five years and the association chief staff officer to 3.8 years is consistent with this.

Response to stress and success

A string of victories or a good early start can fuel CEO narcissism and hubris with two consequences. One is more risky behaviour; the other is complacency.

Top management team problems

An Executive Team can undermine CEOs despite their best efforts to keep them together. Team sway in the opposite direction. The fall victim to groupthink and withholding crucial information from their CEOs. This behaviour undermines his or her ability to make good decisions.

Inferior performance

For top executives cannot themselves rule out a drop in performance (or increase in expectations). Their performance and the performance of the company is one of the same. This failure is usually characterized by an inability to respond to a changing economy, digitization, competition, and evolving customer demands.

Inadequate board vigilance

Boards should not be shy about guiding their CEO. They add value when they are vigilant, irrespective of the length of the CEO’s tenure. Boards shift the balance of power in a firm and temper CEO hubris. They can also coach their CEO by reading market change signals and tapping their invaluable networks and resources. CEOs should not ignore them.

Scandal

Wrongdoing is now more readily exposed, and more companies are getting into trouble. The CEO is always responsible for the scandal. We help CEOs in strengthening their internal audit process. We use artificial intelligence to examine 100% of the company transaction rather than flying blind with sampling 2-3% of the transactions.

The six factors listed above are not exhaustive. However, they are supported by several studies. While they are listed separately, it is their combination, configuration and timing that leads to the unseating of the CEO.

Find the Right Leaders — Build the Right Team

We help Boards and CEOs find the right leaders and teams to succeed in a volatile business environment. We provide a highly accurate prediction of performance. This insight is especially crucial for substantial risk strategic and operational decision making. With the insights of team members behavioural DNA, we can develop the strategy to manage the difference and avoid groupthink.

Using the ladder of leadership, we work with boards and CEOs to understand the makeup of their teams. We assess whether key performance traits are present to drive strategy, embrace change, communicate well and display core leadership qualities needed to achieve the organization’s goals.

Also, we over a breakthrough best-fit staffing process across organizations. We analyze each critical functional area. Next, we determine holes in the team and address them through coaching, development, or recruiting. Strengthen your groups to be useful in Business 4.0.

Preparing for Success

 Business 4.0 success needs to understand Industry 4.0 and Customer 4.0 and to work to engage Employee 4.0. Our approach offers a compelling way to understand and harness both the power and passion of the people within the organization. We discover employees’ superpowers to be customer-centric, grow revenue, and increase stakeholder value.

We offer the best behavioural assessment tool in the marketplace for making high-risk talent decisions. Our approach is a game changer for today’s leaders.

Concluding thoughts

 “Sell the people, not the concept”.

Many leaders believe that if their idea or concept has enough merit, the people will buy in. That is wrong-minded. An agile leader knows that if he or she can sell the people (the customer, the staff, the executive team, the Board), they will sell their concept for them.

To translate intent into actions effectively, the agile leaders ask themselves the following questions before each interaction:

Your aspirational intent.

What is my one most important goal? 

• How does this interaction fit within that goal?
• What is the outcome in this interaction that would best contribute to that one most important goal?

Your transactional intent.

What do I want this [person, team member, stakeholder] to think, feel, and do as the result of stepping out of that meeting with you? 

• What will it take to deliver that outcome?

The best CEOs learn to ask these questions habitually before every important interaction. Try it; it has a dramatic, sometimes surprising, effect on how you engage with others.