Cleo Felix operates on three core values: rigor—without stalling progress; solution orientation—without being blind to context; teach along the way—without pretending to be a know-it-all.

About the founder: Tijs Besieux, PhD

I founded Cleo Felix on one conviction: customer value is the result of leadership.

The biggest payoff of leadership development is therefore not better leaders in the abstract. It is a top team that becomes the company's North Star for customer centricity, so customer-first behavior cascades across the organization. That requires two things most programs avoid. Feedback sharp enough that each leader knows exactly where they stand, and what to stop, start, and continue to create more customer value. And the willingness to change the environment leaders operate in, because behavior that meets friction every day eventually slides back into the way we have always done things around here. Culture eats leadership development for breakfast.

Three experiences over sixteen years brought me to this conviction.

Founders who fell in love with customers, not products

At one of Europe's most competitive high-tech incubators, I coached the founding teams of dozens of startups. Most were product-centric. Convinced their technology was ten times better than anything on the market, often rightly so, their focus was on adding features, not adding customer value. After years of blood, sweat, and tears, reality hit: the market had little interest in their technological work of art.

A small minority was different. These founders had fallen in love with a specific group of customers, often because they had once sat on the other side of the table with a problem they could not solve. They rarely spoke of features. Their language revolved around customer needs. Some arrived with barely a prototype, but with something far more valuable: a network of potential customers willing to open their doors, share the breakthroughs they wanted to realize, and shape what the startup should build next. In six years, only a handful of teams worked this way. They were the ones who made hockey stick growth look easy.

The feedback that makes leaders change

I have spent years studying what makes leaders willing to change their behavior. When I interviewed fifteen senior executives about a moment in their career when they changed for good, one pattern emerged. Every one of them described a crystal clear signal from someone who mattered to them. A peer of twenty years. A customer they deeply admired. A partner at home. Someone sat them down and offered profound feedback on their behavior. Those were the moments when development began to spark.

Later, when I built an award-winning method at a large bank to measure the relationship between leadership behavior and bottom-line results, I saw why. It is the accuracy and relevance of feedback that changes the dialogue. Resistance drops. Leaders lean in, willing to reflect and learn.

Why million-dollar programs fail

In my years advising large organizations, I watched companies invest millions in leadership development with little to show for it. The programs were beautifully designed, launched with a motivating speech by the CEO, and filled with critical topics such as leading change, decision-making, and strategic thinking. Leaders enjoyed them and rated them highly. Then the program cooled down, and the lack of impact became painful.

When I interviewed these leaders, they pointed to their environment. Too much friction. Too many obstacles. Until they gave up on practicing what they had learned. Developing leaders without touching social norms, unwritten rules, decision rights, or KPIs costs more than the program fee. It burns out leaders who are left disappointed by the gap between intention and impact.

Three foundations

Cleo Felix is built on what these experiences taught me. Start with the customer to build a thriving business. Give each leader crystal clear individual feedback to spark change. And shape the environment in which leadership operates, so new behavior sticks and your top 50 move as one.

What your leaders do, your customers feel.

Bio

Tijs Besieux has spent over sixteen years on a single topic: leadership development, from both academic and practitioner perspectives. As a researcher at Harvard Business School and Lingnan University, Hong Kong. As a visiting professor at KU Leuven, Belgium, and IÉSEG School of Management, Paris. And as an advisor to European mid-market companies at Deloitte and later &samhoud, a Dutch leadership development boutique. Today, his academic home is Antwerp Management School, where he is a research fellow studying customer-centric leadership. His thinking is regularly published in top-tier journals, including Harvard Business Review.

“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer”.
—Peter Drucker

Read about our 5-step, 14-week, evidence-based program to enable customer-first leadership.