your customers will never love your company until your employees love it first so if you have good leadership and you have a healthy culture yes be customer obsessed absolutely um but if you have a weak culture and you have toxic leaders no amount of yelling at people to be customer obsessed will ever change anything um so so to truly be customer focused the irony is to truly have customer centricity the irony is is you actually uh uh care about your people leadership can care about the people and the front line people care about the leaders
i care about the customers i mean you know that's the hierarchy again it's who do you touch leadership doesn't interact with a client or a customer ever or rarely and so focus on the people you interact with which is your people leadership is responsible for building the culture get that right and the and the front line staff the people who are uh customer contact they focus on the customer if you get that wrong uh then what happens is you create a culture where customer facing team members are actually scared of doing things to protect themselves
from their own leaders i'll give you example if you have a culture where it's completely normal for people to send a cya email after every decision they make right like a cover your ass email um see seeing everybody just in case something goes wrong you know that is a sign that people are taking time and energy away from doing things for the customer to protect themselves from their own leaders you know if it is standard practice in the company where everybody keeps a folder of all the good things they've ever done you know just in
case you need it it's a sign that people are taking time and energy away from their day away from taking care of a customer to protect themselves from their own company and that's what i mean which is when you have strong leadership where people feel psychologically safe at work all of that energy all of that ingenuity all of that uh innovative ideas goes in the place we want it to go which is to the customer
