Nora's Blog Leadership – The Individual Journey

Is it about you?

I spent a long time talking with a CEO this week about him. We talked about who he was, what was important to him, how he showed up in personality profiles. We didn't spend much time talking about how that worked with his people or with customers.

We do that with our products or our services, too. We talk about our stuff without knowing much about the audience. Then we can't figure out why one customer loves us and the next can't wait to get us out of the room. What's up with THEM?

Yes, it is critical that as leaders, we know ourselves. That might be described as step one. However, if we stop there, we miss the juice. The next step is how that resonates with the customer. Do we really understand how we come across? Do we do any research, ask for any feedback or evaluation? How many times have you listened to someone's presentation, and been turned off by their demeanor, felt bored or  irrelevant to the conversation? Yet, the speaker thought they gave a great presentation.

Where do you get CONSISTENT feedback about how you are showing up? Do you have feedback partners within your organization? Do you have feedback partners outside-customers, vendors, peers?

What product or service does the customer really want? How do you find out? Do you ask them? Do the people within your organization have a template for what to say about your products and what to ask the customer? Do you do market research?

There is so much noise out there and everyone is working so hard to be heard, we can't take it for granted that what we did last year will get us heard now.

I challenge you to get feedback from 3 customers/clients this week on what you should stop doing, what you should start doing, and what you should keep doing.

Let me know how it works out.