Servant Leadership & Great Customer Experiences

Posted on 12. Jul, 2010 by Karen Smith-Will in Leadership

I was approached by Karen Smith-Will to write a blog post. I liked her writing and her perspective on leadership. In this special blog post, Karen pushes us to recognize a stellar customer experience is related to inspiring employees – a topic important to us at Achieved Strategies. At the bottom of this post is a short bio on Karen. Enjoy and please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Are your organization’s customer service efforts netting the results you anticipated? Your organization has already implemented comprehensive customer surveys, appended customer-related competencies onto your performance management tools and perhaps even led massive change management programs to improve some of your customers biggest pain points. But you still can’t meet your goals.

Have you looked at your leadership strategy?

Seventeen years ago, President Clinton, via Executive Order # 12862, identified eight customer-servicing standards to be adhered to by all Federal government entities, including internal and independent agencies. These standards formed a useful cornerstone from which any organization might build its customer-facing policies. However, they in no way constitute a checklist that guarantees positive customer experiences. Why?

The little known answer is revealed in World Class Courtesy: A Best Practices Report, developed by Vice President Al Gore in response to Executive Order # 12862.

After studying well-known giants in customer satisfaction, like Federal Express Corporation, Nordstrom, USAA, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), the report concluded that customer first strategies must be coupled with a coordinating leadership strategy that meets employees’ needs. Dan Sanders, in his 2008 book Built to Serve, reiterated this observation as he studied the practices of a newer crop of customer service heavy-hitters—Southwest Airlines, United Supermarkets, Medtronics and others.

You cannot win the hearts of customers while breaking the backs of your employees.

Viewing money, power, and materialism as symbols of leadership success crushes employees, leads to unfulfilled leaders and sabotages customer experience. Sanders concluded that a new career progression is warranted. He suggests that humility, selflessness and fulfillment should be the coveted characteristics of what he dubbed a “New Career Progression Path.” Sound familiar? It should, because it aligns closely with the pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The leadership strategy described here is collectively known as “servant leadership.” According to Robert Greenleaf, who coined that phrase, “True leadership emerges from those whose primary motivation is a deep desire to help others.”

World Class Courtesy concluded that servant leadership was a “highly effective means for ensuring that the needs of employees and customers are being met. A servant-leader serves his or her employees by providing support needed for each person in the organization to grow both professionally and personally.”

So what are the marks of a servant leader? I have reviewed literature by over fifteen authors and concluded that the following characteristics were cited most frequently: honesty, trustworthiness, stewardship, creativity, empathy, humility and respectfulness. Does your personal improvement plan include beefing up any of these characteristics?

Consider Greenleaf’s test of servant leaders: “Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

If servant leadership characteristics have not made it onto your personal improvement list—yet you suspect that stagnant customer satisfaction, low employee morale or high attrition might be starting to erode your organization’s results—perhaps it’s time to tune up your leadership strategy by becoming a servant.

For additional reading on servant leadership, take a look at my website, www.valutivity.com.

About Karen Smith-Will

Karen Smith-Will is a consultant, writer, speaker and musician. Looking for audacious results? Karen would love to guide you to generate Value Through People & Process©. As the President of Valutivity LLC, she provides business consulting and leadership development to non-profits. She is also a student at Lubbock Christian University pursuing a Master of Science in Leadership, and her primary areas of research are Gen-Y leadership, servant leadership and customer experience. Karen previously invested sixteen years at a Fortune 200 company as an award-winning Process Engineer, Manager and Consultant. Married to her best friend, Barry, for over twenty years and having three beautiful young children, she is a sucker for a good museum, a fun science experiment or jamming with her family’s new band, Willdebeest.

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