To make customer-first leadership stick for good, our program is guided by five principles.
Principle #1: If the executive committee is not in, we’re out.
In our 15 years of experience, we have never seen leadership development work succeed when the executive committee was not visibly involved and did not own their role in both maintaining the status quo and driving the organization forward. That’s why we partner only with clients whose executive committee is willing to step in and help with the heavy lifting.
For the program, this means we actively work with and rely on the executive committee to show up, advocate for the program, reflect on their leadership and how it ripples across the organization, be part of prototyping solutions to elevate customer-centric leadership, and commit to a formal decision-making process to assess and decide on which leadership solutions should be implemented.
Principle #2: The best leverage to improve customer value is through leadership.
To improve customer value, we deliberately choose to emphasize the role of leadership. More specifically, during the program, we usually work with your company’s top 50 leaders, the key people shaping the organization's future.
In the program, your company's top 50 are not observers. They are the main actors, the people whose decisions, priorities, and daily behaviors will determine whether customer-first leadership takes root or fades after the program ends.
Principle #3: Leadership is about behavior, not vague slogans.
Leadership only becomes visible through behavior, the pattern of habits that leaders display every day. And so, to understand where leadership stands on customer-centricity, we must measure the specific behaviors of your top leadership. To do so, we built the CF15™—a science-grade survey that measures 15 specific leadership behaviors across five key clusters. Rather than testing abstract theories, the CF15 looks at hard behavioral metrics: from how your leaders seek market intelligence and redesign operational workflows to how they build cross-functional resilience and balance shareholder value with customer impact.
For the program, this means every leader will be invited to gather 360-degree customer-centric leadership feedback. This allows you to get a company-wide view of where leadership currently stands, gain a deeper understanding of common gaps, and establish a baseline for future assessments.
Principle #4: Leadership behavior cannot be transformed with class-room training alone.
The good news is that leadership can be developed, even to a great extent. However, durable leadership development never takes place in an isolated classroom setting. Leadership behavior is heavily shaped by the context in which leaders operate. For instance, it makes perfect sense for a manager not to give their team members frequent feedback—even though they know the feedback models by heart—when they have span of control of 40 direct reports, barely have time to see their team members doing actual work, have a calendar jam-packed with back-to-back meetings, and are promoted based on KPIs that do not include developing team members to become the next generation of leaders.
Leadership behavior—effective or ineffective—is the result of three root causes: capability (knowing how to behave effectively), motivation (the willingness to behave in a specific way), and opportunity (both the formal context in terms of strategy, organizational structure, HR processes, and the informal structure including social norms, informal power dynamics, and team climate).
For the program, this means we rigorously collect data not only to understand where leadership currently stands but also to capture the root causes driving leadership behavior. These insights are critical for envisioning and prototyping solutions that help top management raise the bar on customer-centric leadership.
Principle #5: Without formal decision-making on which solutions to implement, the program’s impact is reduced to virtually zero.
Transforming leadership behavior toward customer-centric habits depends on the extent to which the executive committee is willing to change the organization as well. If, for instance, the data reveals friction points in terms of KPIs, how meetings are organized, how customer feedback is collected and shared, or how customers are prioritized according to segments, it becomes difficult and probably impossible for leaders to durably change their behavior when that context does not change.
For the program to succeed, we built in a formal decision-making step in which the executive committee decides and communicates which—if any—solutions to implement. This formal decision-making process is key to eliminating friction points, thereby helping leaders to improve their customer-centric habits for good.