This is the third in our series that looks at leadership capacity and its impact on organizational growth. The full series will be available for download as a white paper once it is completed.

In our last article, we discussed the characteristics of transformational leadership that impact organizational growth. Now we want to investigate how to effectively assess a leader’s capacity to lead their company.

Rarely is a great leader born. Developing leadership capacity and the “must have” leadership characteristics does not happen by accident. Organizations cannot sit back and hope leaders develop.

Building leadership capacity is a process that starts with understanding the concept of leadership capacity, defining the expectations of leadership within your particular organization, and then building intentional, implementable steps that help leaders assess and develop their ability to be a leader.

Assessing your organizational leadership

Here are three techniques that will help you assess leadership capabilities as an initial step to developing future leaders within your organization:

1. Clarify organization leadership standards:

In order to develop the type of leaders you want in your organization, you first need to decide what a leader looks like in your organization — to define an organization wide standard for leadership. Take the time to develop and refine a leadership model that will lay out the skills, behavior and “must have” characteristics that are desired by the leaders within your organization.

Leadership standards will vary company by company and will need to address the specific needs and fit within your organizational culture. Since organizational culture is based on the leadership team, leaders need to take the following steps to define a standard for leadership:

• Assess your personal leadership style
• Ask other senior leaders to assess their personal leadership style
• Have the leaders in your company assess each other’s leadership style
• Define the most important leadership standards and characteristics you want to embed into your culture
• Work with other leaders to define the standard characteristics for leadership that best fits your company and its culture

2. Assess leaders against the standards:

Once you have a clear picture of what the ideal leader looks like, develop feedback channels to assess your leaders. Gathering feedback about the current performance of potential and current leaders will help companies assess the current state of individual leaders against the standard. Through the use of assessment tools, companies have the ability to monitor their leadership capacity — individually and collectively — to determine where gaps lie. Consider using some of these tools to garner feedback about your leaders:

• Self-assessment: Who knows better what is needed for a specific position then the person who is currently in the position. Provide individuals with the opportunity to perform a self-assessment to determine which skills and training they require to improve and develop as leaders.Consider developing feedback or self-assessment forms that leaders can fill out on a quarterly basis to ensure they are in tune with the company’s standards for leadership.
• Feedback channel: Provide employees with a feedback channel to solicit input and understand their perspective of your organizations leadership performance. Place the box in a high traffic area, or create a special email address for easy input. Make sure to encourage honest, constructive feedback and reward employees with effective and implementable ideas.
• Employee surveys: Polling employees is an effective way to get information about the leadership structure of your company. Gather input from all levels of the organization to get a holistic assessment of organizational leaders and their capacity to lead. Consider having a yearly company survey to assess the state of leadership within your company.
• Open channels of dialogue: Create an open line of dialogue for employees to talk with leaders about leadership capacity and its impact on organizational culture. Consider setting aside a block of time each week or month to allow brainstorming sessions or meetings related to leadership.
• 360 Degree Assessments: Solicit input from peers and subordinates in all formal assessment process. This ensures that each leader has a fully objective viewpoint of their strengths and areas for improvement as part of their personal growth and development. This is often the most honest and therefore the most useful of all assessments.

3. Develop a meaningful review process:

Many organizations have review processes in place — some similar to those mentioned above.

Unfortunately, for too many organizations, they are just another task that must be completed rather than seen as a valuable tool. In order for reviews to be a valuable activity, leaders need to take action based on the insights and implementable actions they discover during the review process.

Here are three review process ideas that leaders can implement:

• Leadership review process: Allow your employees to assess people that currently hold leadership positions. Turn the tables on leaders and allow employees to ask questions and provide open and honest opinions about where leaders are strong and need improvement. Leaders can set up this leadership assess in a number of ways:
  • Emailing a questionnaire to employees
  • The creation of an internal discussion board
  • Creating a leadership seminar
  • Having an internal leadership conference
  • Having a town hall meeting
• Project reviews: Once a project is complete, it should not be the last we hear of it. Review the performance and leadership capacity of the project lead and strategic initiatives through:
  • The development of a project review process or committee
  • Having the project lead/team assess their performance as a leader in addition to ways they could improve project inefficiencies
  • Don’t just focus on areas of improvement — make sure that you also highlight areas that went well — to ensure they are embedded into future initiatives
• Yearly performance reviews: Review the body of work of all the leaders within your organization. It is these insights that will help to set the strategic direction and lead to the continued growth of your organizations leadership capacity and development of a leadership culture. For the reviews:
  • Set up a review committee
  • Compare the defined company leadership to a leaders performance
  • Discuss leadership strengths and weaknesses with all leaders
  • Suggest areas to improve
  • Have leaders teach and discuss the leadership areas where they excel

Effective organizations have an internal structure in place to assess organizational leaders and determine their capacity to lead. It is this assessment process that identifies people who have the knowledge, skills, and potential to step up and take on a larger leadership role.

The next article in our leadership capacity series will build on these leadership assessment methods and examine how leaders can work to build a culture of leadership within their organization.

SurveyGizmo had a service outage this weekend. It inconvenienced their customers. As a result they built customer loyalty.

On the surface that doesn’t make sense — but the manner in which they dealt with the situation demonstrated the character of their company and their commitment to service. You can see their communication here.

My Perspective: SurveyGizmo did number of things right. Here are a few that jumped out in no particular order. Let me know if you see more.

1. They communicated quickly and honestly. I didn’t even know there was a problem, but yet they communicated the issue to everyone and didn’t try to hide the problem.
2. They were transparent and thorough in their explanation. I have a complete understanding in practical terms what happened and why.
3. They shared a solution to avoid the issue in the future. I have confidence that this issue won’t happen again.
4. They accepted full responsibility for the issue and didn’t try to shift the blame elsewhere.
5. The message was from the CEO and they offered a number where you could call for more answers.
6. They identified any lingering issues and what they were doing to resolve them.
7. They offered workable, alternative solutions to customers to address the problem until everything was resolved.
8. They made me feel like I was an insider.

Overall, they convinced me by their actions that they are committed to supporting my efforts no matter what happens. They will be there for me when I need their service.

So rather than being upset about this issue — I now have a stronger, more trusting relationship with SurveyGizmo than I had before.

Do your service recovery initiatives do as well? If not, have a look at how you handle issues and discover how you can turn adversity into opportunity.

Today, customers are no longer looking for great customer service — they want more. Today customers demand a great customer experience and will not settle for anything less.

It is no longer good enough for companies to provide good customers service — rather, companies need to create memorable interactions with customers that help establish a loyal relationship and promote brand advocacy.

Creating a memorable customer experience is based on the creation of an ideal experience that your customers would want to have throughout their relationship with your company. These interactions take place on a number of channels such as in person, over the phone, through email, and on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Successful customer experiences are scalable and can be managed consistently across multiple channels. Your customers experience must be unique. And, for it to be successful it needs to be clearly defined so that each one of your employees understands how to deliver the experience you want to create for your customers.

10 tips to improve your customer experience

Here are 10 ways that you can improve and refine your customer experience and improve your relationship with customers:

1. Make your customer experience clear: A great customer experience must be scalable across your company, consistent, and be easily understood and implemented by your employees. Have you defined the key elements that must be delivered to every customer? Review your customer experience documents and ask your employees if they understand what is expected of them.
2. Make your customer experience simple: If your customer experience is too complex, your employees will have difficulty delivering a consistent experience. Keep it simple. Do your employees understand what is expected of them? Are there too many rules? Consider relaxing the constraints on your employees so they can focus on creating an experience that creates a positive customer outcome rather than simply following a list of rules.
3. Define customer experience by channel: Customer experiences will vary by the channel that customers use to interact with your company. In person and online experiences are different and this needs to be reflected in how companies approach their customers on each channel.  Does your ideal customer experience vary by channel? If not, clearly outline the experience you want to create for each platform and point of interaction with your customers.
4. Address the emotional need: The focus of customer experience management needs to be on addressing your customer’s emotional need. Do you understand your customer’s emotional needs? What are you doing to ensure their emotional need is addressed?
5. Make sure all levels of your organization are involved: Creating a truly great customer experience is a company wide effort. There needs to be a consistent experience across the board. Does your company have an internal feedback process in place? How do you know your customers experience is consistent? Implement a regular review process and collect feedback about the customer experience.
6. Get your employees to buy in: If your employees do not buy in, your customers experience will suffer. If employees are not buying in, it is often a sign that your customer experience is too complex, or worse, isn’t relevant to the customer. What are you doing to ensure that your employees are buying in and creating the experience your customers want?
7. Talk to your customers: Ask your customers what they want. Be direct — ask them what your company can do to improve their experience. These conversations will help to build relationships. What can you do to better understand your customer’s emotional need? Create feedback channels that will help you capture and respond to your customer’s emotional needs.
8. Test your customer experience: Before launching any new customer experience initiatives, ask some of your customers to test drive your approach and provide feedback. You will be surprised what you will learn and uncover some of the oversights that you have missed. Plus you’ll avoid the expense of a false start that doesn’t really resonate with customers.
9. Narrow your focus: If you do not understand your ideal customer, then the experience you have created for them will be off target. Who are your customers? Do you have an ideal customer profile? What do your customers want to get out of their interaction and relationship with your company? Offer incentives to customers to get their opinion through surveys and focus groups.
10. Measure the experience: Measure, measure, measure. If you do not have the tools in place to measure your customer’s experience, then you will not have the ability to refine the experience and gain new insights. What tools are you using to measure your customers experience? Develop a system to measure your customer’s experience.

Creating a highly engaging customer experience will lead to better relationships with customers that will not only generate consistent income, but also develop brand advocates out of current customers that will help generate a new stream of business.

Recently I had to replace my 2 rear snow tires in my front wheel drive car. Shortly after, I noticed that the front end seemed sloppy when cornering and suspected that possibly I had a problem with my front tires as well. A visit to my local tire shop resulted in them assuring me my front tires were fine — good tread, good pressure and no wear or balance issues. But the sloppy feeling persisted.

So I went to my dealership and had them look at the front end — and they also indicated that everything was fine. However, they suggested that the new rear tires might be the issue.

So back I went to the tire store, explained the situation and was pleasantly surprised by their response.

First they indicated that sometimes the match of tires with cars doesn’t always work — who knew? Possibly the tires they had recommended were not a good match for my vehicle — although they were an excellent tire.

Secondly, they indicated that they would install a different, more expensive, tire they felt might be a better match.

Third, they refused to accept any money for the new, more expensive, tires — even after I insisted that I should pay for the difference. They felt the inconvenience of having to return a couple times had already cost me enough.

My Perspective: I felt that the tire shop had gone above and beyond in looking after me. They could easily have told me I owed the difference between my original purchase and the new tires. Instead they choose to put my interests ahead of their own — and created a positive obligation.

The made me feel like it was important to them that I got the right tires for my car — making me feel like I was a friend versus just another customer.

The world is based on reciprocity and they created a positive imbalance based on the excellent customer experience which I wanted to balance by telling my friends about the great service

What are you doing to create a positive imbalance with your customers — so they feel a positive obligation to tell their friends about your exceptional customer experience?

Recently had lunch with a client — we agreed to meet at restaurant near their office at noon.

I arrived 15 minutes early due to favourable traffic conditions — so I checked for a reservation (there was none) and asked to be seated.

About 12:10 I was a bit concerned. My client is very punctual, so my first thought was not that they were running late — but had they arrived and we had missed each other.

A quick tour of the restaurant proved me right. She was sitting at another area of the restaurant wondering the same thing. I am also habitually punctual and always call when delayed.

By the time we connected and were re-seated it was now after 12:15. Both had afternoon commitments.

The Manager came by to apologize and when the bill came, the entire lunch was complementary due to the aggravation and inconvenience.

So how did the restaurant do? Did they put the customer first? Did they create a “Woo Hoo” experience?

My Perspective: As you might guess, I feel they missed some opportunities.

Obviously there were some issues at the front desk that need to be addressed, but that is not what I want to talk about. I’d like to think about the end result — a free lunch. I should mention it was a simple meal with no alcohol, so the cost was not significant — approx $30.00.

I think the Manager gave too much away. Rather than giving us a free lunch, a significant discount would have been fine. That would have shown they appreciated the situation they had created yet they could still have made some revenue. But even that point is debatable.

The real loss was not providing us with an incentive to return and experience the type of service they were capable to providing.

They should have given us each a coupon/certificate of some kind for a discount or free appetizer with a comment something like this;

“I apologize that today we failed in our promise of an exceptional experience. In addition to the discount to address our failure today, I would like to give you each a coupon to entice you to come back again and give us the opportunity to demonstrate the exceptional service we are known for.”

With the discount we were very pleased, but had no compelling reason to return. They fixed our current problem — but weren’t thinking about the future.

With the coupon, the restaurant had now created a reason to choose their restaurant above another. They had made a commitment to do better and had created some positive pressure to get us to return to see if they were up to the challenge.

So when you are dealing with a recovery — are you just looking to correct the current situation? Or do you have an intentional plan to create a positive reason for the customer to return to your location and give you another opportunity to demonstrate that you deserve their business.

Make sure you don’t leave any lost opportunity on the table.