Use your cultural movement to amplify your leadership capacity

The CEO of a business-to-business manufacturing client we worked with on CX and EX initiatives, helping them renew and evolve their culture to be more customer-driven, introduced a wonderful phrase. He said that the biggest constraint to the success of their CX and EX initiatives was their “leadership capacity,” by which he meant the ability of the leadership to build support for change and coach their teams throughout the company’s journey. Leaders’ capacity to drive change is impacted not only by having the right strategy and data-driven support for their decisions but freeing up the time to work on the initiatives and fostering the right collaborative environment and skills in the people involved to have the maximum impact.

If you want to grow your leadership capacity, you need to address motivation and readiness for change together with upskilling, all while freeing up and ensuring the resources are available to work on the changes required. Building your cultural movement will dramatically increase multiple elements of your leadership capacity. You'll have a broader number of resources who are motivated, ready, and upskilled beyond just your most senior leaders. It will dramatically expand your capacity to work on your CX opportunities by engaging a broader set of leaders, managers, and frontline employees in the CX and culture movement. 

I’ve since built on the CEO’s perspectives to create the exhibit below that shows an equation for leadership capacity that you can apply to your company’s journey. Let’s dive into the variables one at a time.

Leadership Capacity is the product of:

Motivation

To build and nurture your employees’ motivation and commitment to change, it’s helpful to engage your employs in the development and ongoing application of your Experience CollageTM.  To galvanize a self-sustaining movement, there needs to be a shared belief that the company is truly committed to seeing the journey through and won’t succumb to change fatigue and give up. This requires leadership, as well as taking the time to build alignment among your leaders and extend this out to your managers and frontline employees. Finally, encouraging your leaders and managers to take the time to connect with their teams and mentees on how they can contribute and how participating in the journey will enhance their personal growth is key to tapping into the full energy and creativity of your people.

Change Readiness

As you think about a culture-led approach to change management, it is important to understand the barriers to change in your organization and be proactive in how you address them. I really like the framework REDUCE from Jonah Berger, a professor at Wharton. You can find our review of his book The Catalyst here, and read our further thoughts on applying the lessons from The Catalyst.

The framework focuses on six different elements in the acronym spelled out by REDUCE: R is for Reactance, E is for Endowment, D is for Distance, U is for Uncertainty, C-E is for Corroborating Evidence. Focusing on these six elements allows you to build greater awareness of the barriers to change and make choices about your change management tactics. As you’ll see, behavior adoption and enrolling the right change agents to influence others aligns well with this framework. 

Upskilling

Many new digital tools are available that can help you engage your people to gamify their learning and reinforce the adoption of new skills. You can also support their learning journey through internal and external programs to get badged or certified in new skills. Rather than boil the ocean or allow things to emerge haphazardly, it can be helpful to funnel your employees’ natural energy to bond and learn into one of the cornerstone disciplines such as human-centered design, agile product management, quality management, data science and AI, and change management. There are programs available that you can encourage your people to participate in, as well as partners that you can work with to create more customized approaches for your company that also leverage their content and experience. JourneySpark Consulting has its own offerings in this space, as well as a network of partners that we can help you engage to find the right solution for your needs.

Available Resources

A common complaint in working on CX transformation efforts is that people don’t have the time to engage properly. Often, the resources working on CX efforts are “partial FTEs” (full-time equivalents) that spend only a fraction of their time on the effort. This is often referred to as “working off the side of your desk.” In many cases, dozens of FTEs work on CX initiatives, but only a few dedicated people. Even when companies have 10-20+ people on their CX team, the total FTEs involved in CX are still typically higher than the dedicated talent (note that the CX Capability Maturity study with MMA Global shows that CX leaders are more likely to have more than 15 employees on their dedicated CX team). The solution isn’t always to add people to your centralized team, though that can be part of the answer. You can also focus on freeing up more of people’s time so the time they do spend is more productive. You can also augment your internal team using freelance resources, staff augmentation, or delivery partners that help get the work done. To make the results sticky and most effective, however, you should focus on building your capability and not depend too much on outside firms.

One way to free up time is through automation, such as using AI to reduce the time spent on specific tasks (see our blog series on AI and CX). This is a growing area of opportunity, given the improvements in various AI technologies that augment and replace the tasks done by people. The buzz around ChatGPT has drawn attention to this area, but there have been many use cases for AI that have been around for roughly a decade to help address this opportunity. You can also take a human-centered design and agile approach to improving your internal “ease of doing business.” That is, focus on the EX-CX intersection so that your employees free up time and focus on the highest value activities for how they engage customers directly and indirectly on your CX initiatives.

You can also approach the resource challenge by stepping back and reimagining your operating model, taking a fresh look at what roles you have inside versus outside the company, as well as the playbook that you put in place for how people team in the organization.