An evidence-based, 14-week, five-step program to turn customer-first leadership from aspiration to daily habit.

We offer a 14-week, five-step program that enables your leaders to understand where they stand on customer-first behavior, identify the root causes driving their leadership, and envision and implement practical solutions that sustain over time.

We call it The 5D Program™.

Step 1 — Define the business case [Week 1]

• After contracting, we work with the executive committee to define the program’s specific business case. This means building a coherent narrative about why the program matters, why it matters now, what is expected of key stakeholders, and how the program will unfold in the coming period to achieve specific targets.

• We also conduct a pre-mortem, a series of conversations with key stakeholders to understand and address the factors that might limit the program’s success. For example, while working with a German construction company, we learned that one division had just undergone a substantial transformation project that required a significant time commitment from senior leaders. To avoid the pitfall of change fatigue, we incorporated this insight into the program’s design.

Step 2 — Draw in the company’s top 50 [Weeks 2-3]

• As the program’s success hinges on commitment from your company’s leaders—usually the top 50—we create space and time to poll them and tap their motivation to be central to creating positive change.

• We do so by organizing a half-day kick-off session for your company’s top 50, open-door online sessions to further clarify the program’s intent and specific milestones, distributing a podcast (usually a conversation with the company’s CEO) to highlight the urgency and the potential of customer-centric leadership, as well as supporting slide decks and email templates for program participants to distribute to their teams.

Step 3 — Diagnose customer-centric leadership [Weeks 4-7]

• To get a valid understanding of where leaders stand today and what drives their customer-first behavior, we rigorously gather and analyze multi-source data. Data sources include: survey data, 1:1 in-depth interviews with customers, leaders, and employees across functions and levels, team observations, and analysis of existing strategy documentation.

• By compiling these data sources, we can distill a clear understanding of current customer-centric leadership and the root causes driving today’s leadership behavior. The analysis is written up as a six-page narrative and validated with your leadership before designing specific solutions. In addition, we provide relevant materials for leaders to debrief their teams, and full documentation if relevant for audit and regulatory purposes.

Step 4 — Design leadership solutions [Weeks 8-11]

• Once the key findings are validated, we organize a full-day work session with your leadership. In small teams, leaders work to envision and prototype practical solutions to elevate customer-first leadership. Drawing on design thinking, teams are challenged to conceive bold yet feasible solutions that reduce obstacles that stand in the way of leaders, thereby strengthening their customer-centric habits.

• During the work session, the group of leaders decides on the three most promising solutions. We then work with these teams to prepare a pitch for the executive committee.

Step 5 — Deploy and monitor solutions [Weeks 12-14]

• During a formal executive committee meeting, the top proposals are pitched and decided on. Once the executive committee has decided, we establish a feedback loop to inform the leadership group about which proposals made the cut and why.

• After the formal decision-making, we help change management teams implement and monitor the solutions. Monitoring continues beyond the 14-week timeline—change takes time—but remains within the program's scope and budget.

Throughout the program, we work daily with sponsors and key stakeholders, organize regular teaching sessions to help program participants gain a deeper understanding of why customer-centric leadership is imperative and what it looks like in practice, and facilitate feedback loops and validation sessions to ensure everyone is on the same page, which is to guide the organization to create competitive customer value.

Reach out today.