Simon Sinek argues that customers will only love a company after its employees do: strong leadership must build a healthy culture so frontline staff can focus on customers. If leadership is toxic, employees spend energy protecting themselves (e.g., sending 'CYA' emails or keeping folders of accomplishments) rather than serving customers. Psychological safety among employees redirects ingenuity and effort toward customer service.
Chapters
Your customers will never love your company until your employees love it first. So if you have good leadership and you have a healthy culture, yes, be customer obsessed, absolutely. But if you have a weak culture and you have toxic leaders, no amount of yelling at people to be customer obsessed will ever change anything. So to truly be customer focused, the irony is to truly have customer centricity, the irony is you actually care about your people. Leadership can care about the people and the frontline people care about the leaders. I care about the customers I need. You know, that's the hierarchy again. It's who do you touch? Leadership doesn't interact with the client or a customer ever or rarely. And so focus on the people you interact with, which is your people. Leadership is responsible for building the culture. Get that right. And the frontline staff, the people who are customer contact, they focus on the customer. If you get that wrong, then what happens is you create a culture where customer facing team members are actually scared of and doing things to protect themselves from their own leaders. I'll give you an example. If you have a culture where it's completely normal for people to send a CYA email after every decision they make, right? Like a cover your ass email ccing everybody just in case something goes wrong, you know, that is a sign that people are taking time and energy away from doing things for the customer to protect themselves from their own leaders. You know, if it is standard practice in the company where everybody keeps a folder of all the good things they've ever done, you know, just in case you need it, it's a sign that people are taking time and energy away from their day, away from taking care of a customer to protect themselves from their own company. And that's what I mean, which is when you have strong leadership where people feel psychologically safe at work, all of that energy, all of that ingenuity, all of that innovative ideas goes in the place we want it to go, which is to the customer.
