An evidence-based, 14-week, five-step program to turn customer-first leadership from aspiration to daily habit.
Enabling customer-first leadership takes a clear business case, committed leaders, a sound diagnosis, practical solutions, and disciplined follow-through.
Our 5D Program™ brings these elements together in five steps. It is designed around your top 50 leaders, the people best positioned to shape leadership behavior across the organization.
Step 1: Define the business case (Week 1)
With the executive committee, we clarify why customer-centricity matters, and why it matters now. We build on the company's achievements while making the case that future competitiveness requires a systemic and sustained leadership effort.
Step 2: Draw in the top 50 (Weeks 2–3)
A CEO fireside chat brings together the 50 leaders best positioned to cascade customer-first leadership. They explore the company's history, strengths, and the challenges ahead, and understand that this is a collective change effort, not another training program.
Step 3: Diagnose customer-first leadership (Weeks 4–7)
We combine 360-degree data from all 50 leaders with interviews, observations, customer input, and organizational evidence. After executive validation, the top 50 explore the largest friction points in an interactive artifact session and connect them to their own feedback. Individual coaching then helps turn insight into action.
Step 4: Design solutions (Weeks 8–11)
In a full-day solution session, the top 50 co-design prototypes that address friction across capability, motivation, and environment. The strongest ideas are selected, each led by a captain whom Cleo Felix supports in developing an executive committee-ready business case.
Step 5: Deploy and monitor (Weeks 12–14)
The executive committee formally decides which proposals to pursue and appoints change teams to implement them. Regular check-ins, quality controls, and outcome measures create the feedback loop needed to refine the solutions and make customer-first leadership stick.
What does this mean in practice? Micro-case: The telecom operator that decreased churn.
A European telecom operator came to us after its commercial leaders flagged that large business customers were leaving at an increasing rate. Early interviews across the value chain pointed to a much-needed reframe of the issue: from below-par customer experience to a company-wide leadership challenge.
What the data revealed
We gathered multi-source data, including 360 survey results, 1:1 interviews with customers, leaders, and employees, team observations, and internal strategy documents, to understand where leadership stood and what was holding it back. Four root causes emerged:
KPIs that pulled attention inward. Especially support-function metrics pulled attention away from creating customer value, making it difficult for team leaders to connect the day-to-day with the company’s bigger picture.
A culture where mistakes were costly. Leaders held a social norm that mistakes were to be avoided at all costs, creating little appetite for teams to envision breakthrough innovations for their customers that might fail at first.
Decisions driven by internal logic. Across virtually every level, decision-making defaulted to internal criteria rather than customer needs.
Market intelligence that didn't travel. Customer satisfaction and other market data existed but rarely reached teams deeper inside the organization, who could make an actual difference.
From diagnosis to action
During a full-day session, the company's top 50 worked in small teams to prototype solutions targeting each root cause. The group selected the three most promising proposals and prepared a formal pitch for the executive committee — who signed off on all three, creating both legitimacy and resources for implementation.
The outcome
Six months later, churn had leveled off. The early signals were moving the right way: enterprise customers said they felt better heard, their needs better anticipated. Customer conversations shifted from exit to future growth.
Our program is built on decades of academic research on leadership development, organizational culture, and change management, as well as years of practical experience guiding leadership groups to achieve lasting customer value. Key studies we draw from include:
Büschgens, T., Bausch, A., & Balkin, D. B. (2013). Organizational culture and innovation: A meta‐analytic review. Journal of product innovation management, 30(4), 763-781.
Edmondson, A. C., & Besieux, T. (2021). Reflections: voice and silence in workplace conversations. Journal of Change Management, 21(3), 269-286.
Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 1(1), 23-43.
Lines, R. (2004). Influence of participation in strategic change: resistance, organizational commitment and change goal achievement. Journal of change management, 4(3), 193-215.
Michie, S., Van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation science, 6(1), 42.
Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important?. Review of educational research, 82(3), 330-348.
Stouten, J., Rousseau, D. M., & De Cremer, D. (2018). Successful organizational change: Integrating the management practice and scholarly literatures. Academy of Management Annals, 12(2), 752-788.
Verplanken, B., & Orbell, S. (2022). Attitudes, habits, and behavior change. Annual review of psychology, 73, 327-352.
Yukl, G. (1989). Managerial leadership: A review of theory and research. Journal of management, 15(2), 251-289.
Read our blog for insights on the link between strategy, leadership, and customer value.