Source: OCEAN/CORBIS
To answer this question it can be helpful to start with the opposite question: why aren’t leaders Customer-Centric? In many cases, it appears to depend on chance!
There are many reasons leaders are driven away from being truly customer-centric:
- the dominant profit and shareholder value focus in many organizations,
- the siloed and internal focus in most large corporations,
- the pressure on short-term results at the cost of customer relationships and customer value.
But these are not the most important reasons!
In our research of more than 65 senior leaders around the globe customer-centric leadership occurs by chance – an upbringing in a family that runs a small business, working for a boss who happens to be customer-centric, an experience in a business that is ruined by lack of attention to customers.
What is lacking in organizations and tertiary learning institutions is the systematic training and development of leadership with a specific customer-centric focus.
There are virtually no university courses around the globe dedicated to the teaching of customer-centric leadership. Most organizations do not have this as a focused L&D program for senior leadership, the extended leadership group or for prospective and aspiring leaders.
How can you expect leaders to have the new currency of customer-centric leadership required for success by the new world of disruption and customer-driven strategies if you leave it to chance?
There are simply too many organizational pressures working against it.
Don’t leave your organization’s fate up to chance!
There is an answer. Research reported in The Customer Culture Imperative tells you what is required. Learn more about our dedicated Learning and Development programs for leaders at here.
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