The question leadership researchers forgot to ask.
by Tijs Besieux, PhD
I started studying leadership when I was 18. It took me another 18 years to realize that most evidence-backed leadership models leave out a crucial organizing question:
Value for whom?
What do major business domains such as strategy, marketing, sales, and innovation have in common? They may use different language, but they share a starting point: the customer. They ask what customers are struggling with, what progress they are trying to make, and where existing solutions fall short.
For strategists, that struggle should inform the organization’s winning aspiration, the starting point for sound strategy development. For marketers, it is part of the brand narrative. For salespeople, it is the space in which they seek to understand and empathize with customers. For innovation teams, it is where they look for opportunities to invent for their customers.
Without customers, there is no organization. If all customers of business XYZ decide to take their business elsewhere tomorrow, organization XYZ ceases to exist. And so, without customers, a business cannot have a positive impact on its other stakeholders, such as employees, the broader community, and its shareholders.
Domains such as strategy, marketing, sales, and innovation also suggest that, for an organization to continue creating meaningful value for customers, it is up to leaders across the company to shape and sustain that focus.
If customer value is so central to business relevance, and if leadership is a function that keeps that focus firmly rooted in day-to-day operations, we should expect it to appear prominently in how leadership is defined and measured.
But does it?
What prominent leadership styles measure
Let’s look at some of the most widely studied leadership styles and the questionnaires used to measure them.
Transformational leadership emphasizes motivating followers toward shared goals. Authentic leadership emphasizes the leader’s self-awareness, internalized morality, balanced processing, and relational transparency. Ethical leadership emphasizes normatively appropriate conduct and its promotion among followers. Servant leadership emphasizes serving followers and other stakeholders, while leader–member exchange, or LMX, focuses on the quality of leader–member relationships.
Thus, prominent scientific leadership styles emphasize topics such as political dynamics, moral principles, communication, employee care, accountability, sustainability, consistency between beliefs and actions, and the quality of leader–member relationships. I’m sure these are valuable perspectives. I even dedicated my PhD thesis to deepening our understanding of transformational leadership.
And although these elements may influence customer outcomes, customer value is rarely the explicit organizing referent for the leadership construct. This becomes even more explicit when you consider how such leadership styles are measured. Below are a few examples.
Transformational leadership questionnaire sample items
“Understands the political dynamics of the leading group.”
“Takes decisions based on moral and ethical principles.”
“Keeps in touch using face-to-face communication.”
Source: Alimo-Metcalfe, B., & Alban-Metcalfe, R. J. (2001). The development of a new transformational leadership questionnaire. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 74(1), 1–27.
Ethical leadership questionnaire sample items
“Is interested in how I feel and how I am doing.”
“Holds me accountable for problems over which I have no control (R).”
“Stimulates recycling of items and materials in our department.”
Source: Kalshoven, K., Den Hartog, D. N., & De Hoogh, A. H. (2011). Ethical leadership at work questionnaire (ELW): Development and validation of a multidimensional measure. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(1), 51–69.
Authentic leadership questionnaire sample items
“Says exactly what he or she means.”
“Makes decisions based on his/her core beliefs.”
“Demonstrates beliefs that are consistent with actions.”
Source: Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, W. L., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126.
Again, these constructs may have important consequences for customers, but customer value is rarely conceived as the North Star to which leaders direct their efforts.
This is not an argument that existing leadership styles are irrelevant to customers. Servant leadership, for example, in its origins, emphasizes serving “the community,” which implicitly includes customers, although customers are not typically the construct's primary referent. Nor is it an argument that established leadership approaches do not contribute to customer value.
My argument is that these prominent leadership models leave an important question under-specified: How does a leader keep the organization oriented toward creating meaningful value for customers?
Customer-relevant leadership perspectives
The marketing and sales literature has not ignored leadership’s role in customer value. It offers several customer-relevant leadership perspectives and adjacent organizational frameworks.
Two of the closest are market-oriented leadership and service leadership.
Market-oriented leadership builds on the idea that leaders should ensure the organization generates, shares, and acts on intelligence about customers, competitors, and changing market needs. Service leadership focuses on creating the conditions—such as employee support, service climate, empowerment, and coordination—that enable people to deliver value in customer interactions.
These perspectives are valuable because they make customers, service, or market responsiveness more visible than many established leadership models do. Yet they remain partial. Market orientation is often conceptualized as an organizational culture or a set of cross-functional processes rather than as a clearly specified construct of individual leadership behavior. Service leadership tends to focus on service delivery and frontline conditions.
Consequently, these perspectives identify important customer-relevant behaviors without fully explaining how leaders integrate task-, relation-, and change-oriented behaviors around the explicit referent of meaningful and sustainable customer value.
In other words, the marketing and sales literature offers valuable pieces, but not yet a comprehensive behavioral account of customer-centric leadership.
It is also important to acknowledge that “customer-centricity,” a term popularized by Peter Fader, has become a well-established research domain in marketing and strategy. In this tradition, customer-centricity is defined as a strategy that aligns a company’s development and delivery of products and services with the current and future needs of a select set of customers in order to maximize their long-term financial value to the firm. At its core, it is about knowing who your most valuable customers are and then guiding resources to address their concerns and needs. Empirical work in this domain has linked customer-centric organizational structures and practices to stronger long-term financial performance. Yet, while customer-centricity offers relevant perspectives and frameworks at the organizational level—and provides powerful insights for sales, marketing, and data analytics teams—it does not (and does not claim to) specify how leaders can direct their organizations to achieve and sustain customer-centricity in day-to-day behavior.
The distinction matters. I would not claim that these approaches lack behavioral content. Market orientation includes behaviors such as generating market intelligence, disseminating it across departments, and responding to it. Empowering leadership includes behaviors such as providing information, discretion, coaching, and support. Service leadership includes behaviors related to service climate, employee enablement, and customer responsiveness.
My, perhaps more precise, argument is this:
These perspectives identify important customer-relevant behaviors, but they do not consistently formulate them as a comprehensive, customer-referent taxonomy of leadership behavior.
The Service-Profit Chain is also highly relevant. It explains how internal service quality, employee satisfaction and capability, service value, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, growth, and profitability may be connected. However, it is better understood as a causal business-performance framework than as a leadership style or behavioral taxonomy. It helps explain why leadership attention to employees and service conditions may ultimately affect customer loyalty and profitability, but it does not specify the full range of behaviors through which leaders organize work around customer value.
And so, although research in psychology, organizational behavior, sales, and marketing offers insightful and practical pieces of the puzzle, a full-range conceptualization of customer-centric leadership—through a behavioral lens—still seems to be missing.
Why I believe this matters
For most businesses, customers are central to organizational viability. If customers no longer want to do business with an organization, the entire operation is likely to collapse.
This observation has intrigued me for several years because I have an unshakeable belief that leadership behavior is crucial to shaping and sustaining a culture in which customer value becomes the company-wide North Star.
Perhaps I am making this a bigger problem than it seems. Yet I see two important consequences of leaving this question under-specified.
1. What we teach is what we get
Many leadership development programs fail to deliver a healthy return on investment. In part, I believe this stems from the gap between how an organization seeks to create value for its customers and the leadership principles taught in training programs.
In my years of consulting, I have had the opportunity to audit plenty of leadership development programs. In my experience, the same pattern repeats: the topics in such leadership programs are all interesting, yet they often fail to start with the leader–customer dyad as a core lever for long-term business performance.
Here are two examples from programs I reviewed:
A one-year leadership development program for the top 100 leaders of a telecom operator. Throughout the program, there was not a single module on why customers of that telco operator choose to take their business elsewhere (churn), and how that translates into the work leaders need to do.
In the three-week intensive onboarding program for first-time leaders of a specialty chemicals company, not once did the program facilitators address the following two questions:
What is the value the company creates for its customers so that it earns their loyalty?
What can leaders, company-wide, do in their day-to-day behavior to ensure that all employees keep the customer as the focal organizing principle?
The modules in the leadership programs were both interesting and entertaining. But if HR fails to include even one soundbite on the key stakeholder that fuels the organization to keep going, there is a considerable risk of developing a generation of leaders who sail forward with a major blind spot on their compass.
I used to teach leadership to hundreds of students at universities who aspired to careers in HR. Thinking about it now, I probably never explicitly mentioned that leadership is an important lever for keeping an organization focused on creating value for its customers.
If this is how we train the next generation of HR professionals, it should not be surprising if they overlook one of their most important strategic responsibilities: helping leaders align people, systems, and decisions with customer value.
HR professionals sit close to one of an organization’s most important assets: its current and future leaders. Yet leadership education can leave them with insights focused primarily on internal relationships, motivation, ethics, and employee development, without sufficiently addressing how an organization stays relevant to its customers.
I would love to see more HR professionals take on projects by saying:
“As an organization, we want to create value for our customers. Leadership is one of the functions that keeps the organization focused on those customers. Let’s therefore figure out how we can help our leaders do so.”
2. Organizational systems can pull leaders away from customers
This would not be such a problem if most organizations were already strongly customer-oriented. Leaders who join or grow within those organizations could connect the dots:
“This is the organization’s focus, and these are the ingredients of effective leadership. I will connect the dots.”
But I have learned through 16 years of consulting that many organizations are far from customer-oriented. They have unintentionally created a plethora of processes, rules, KPIs, and social norms that steer the organization away from making customer value a focal organizing principle.
Consider a leader trained in transformational leadership. The leader has learned how to inspire a team to achieve more together than any individual could achieve alone.
Now imagine that this leader joins a company with a major goal of “selling 30% more of product X by next year.” Those two things fit together perfectly. The leader can inspire the team, set ambitious targets, and mobilize everyone around the goal.
But unless the leader also asks what selling more of product X means for customers, the organization may become very effective at achieving an internally defined target without creating proportionate value for the people it exists to serve.
The team may sell more because the product genuinely helps customers. Or it may sell more because of aggressive incentives, pressure, discounting, or tactics that shift value from customers to the organization.
The leadership model itself does not necessarily help the leader distinguish between these possibilities.
A proposed construct
I propose customer-centric leadership as a behavioral leadership construct in which customer value is the explicit referent for how leaders make sense of the business, set direction, make decisions, lead change, and develop people.
Customer-centric leadership does not mean pleasing customers at any cost. It means creating the conditions in which customer value becomes a consistent criterion for organizational choices, while still balancing legitimate obligations to employees, owners, communities, and other stakeholders.
This would require leaders across the organization to ask questions such as:
Who are our valuable customers?
What customer problem are we trying to solve?
What progress are our customers trying to make?
How do we know whether we are creating meaningful value for them?
Which of our processes, policies, and KPIs unintentionally make customer value harder to create?
What trade-offs are we making between short-term organizational results and long-term customer value?
How do we help employees understand their contribution to the customer’s success?
In this view, customer-centric leadership is not simply another leadership style to add to an already overcrowded party.
It is a way of defining the referent around which leadership behavior is organized.
Transformational, authentic, ethical, servant, empowering, and market-oriented leadership may all contribute to customer value. But customer-centric leadership asks whether leaders consistently direct those capabilities toward creating meaningful and sustainable value for customers.
This also means that customer-centric leadership should not be measured only through broad perceptions such as “my leader cares about customers.” It should be measured through observable behaviors.
For example, do leaders:
Seek insight into customers’ current and emerging needs?
Translate customer insight into strategic priorities and operational choices?
Encourage employees to raise customer concerns and inconvenient market evidence?
Remove organizational barriers that make it difficult to create customer value?
Lead changes in processes, systems, and priorities when customer needs evolve?
Help employees understand how their work contributes to customer outcomes?
Balance short-term performance pressures with the long-term interests of customers?
These questions point toward a behavioral construct that can complement, rather than replace, existing leadership perspectives.
The contribution of transformational leadership, for example, may be essential when leaders need to mobilize people around a customer-focused change. Servant leadership may help leaders develop the people who create value for customers. Ethical leadership may help prevent the organization from unfairly extracting value from customers. Market orientation may help the organization understand changing customer and competitive conditions.
But customer-centric leadership asks a different organizing question:
Are leaders using these capabilities to keep the organization focused on creating meaningful value for customers?
In my next blog post, I will propose a way to define and measure customer-centric leadership so leaders can assess where they stand and work to resolve any friction that holds them back from developing it.