I was telling a friend about a recent meeting with a senior leadership team: “It was a great meeting because they immediately ‘got’ that the way they treat their people affects the way their people treat their customers.”
My friend (who is very non-corporate) laughed, “Even I get that!”
This seems like an incredibly obvious equation — Better Leadership Interaction = Better Employee Interaction = Better Customer Experience = Better Results.
If we recognize that this chain is largely about emotion, we could also write it as the chain of emotional capital:
Leader EQ -> Workplace Climate -> Customer Delight -> Win.
It’s a blinding flash of the obvious… and now we can MEASURE all these steps… yet it is phenomenally rare in organizational life.
Why? Perhaps we get caught up in the flurry of “stuff to do” and quarterly pressures, and we forget that ALL leadership is people-leadership. Perhaps we forget that ALL relationships are an emotional exchange — and that ultimately the value of an enterprise can be more accurately measured by emotional capital than by EBITDA.
Do you see organizational leaders following this “golden rule” (treat your employees as you wish your customers will be treated)? Why doesn’t it happen more often?
