As essential as it is to create a vision for and to serve your own vertical team, Brian told us, it's equally important to do the same for your peers and those you don't directly manage:
If we can get leaders who are adjacent to our area to come help us and then be willing to give them the credit for the help they provide, it doesn't take away from my leadership or my team's contribution at all. This is a powerful way to get a lot more intelligence and mind share and support for something bigger that we all need to be working on. In doing so, we create a win for everybody.
Knowing that getting others to collaborate isn't always easy, Brian offered technical resources from his own team in order to help others help him. He operated on a compelling premise: “We are going to win if we help others win. We've got to give in order to get. If we can move the whole organization, what we are going to get is so much bigger than what we could ever have done on our own… Being humble and letting others shine comes back to you many times over.” Brian's team created moments when leaders from other parts of the organization would come together and showcase their work. These forums elevated others, honored them, and gave them public recognition and credit for the contributions they were making.
While the core of the customer experience approach to leading is elevating others, staying in the background, and giving credit to others, Brian makes sure that those who do the giving are refueled with the energy they need to keep on giving. Each week, he and his leadership team hold standup meetings at which they highlight what everyone is working on and look into problems, successes, lessons learned, and even failures they've had. Those who work in different geographic locations join by video. During these meetings, the leadership team looks for “praise moments” where they can draw attention to exemplary behaviors in front of everyone. When they hear or see something they want to shine a spotlight on, someone will say, “Let's pause for just a moment. That right there was a wonderful example of what we are striving to do.” When people see the successes and hear the positive feedback, it creates momentum.
“When working to transform a company into a customer-focused, digital organization,” Brian told us, “it's immensely helpful to frame the leadership scope as a mission that transcends organizational boundaries. Customers don't know which part of an organization they are dealing with! Limiting the leadership model to the immediate team greatly limits the scope and speed of impact a leader can have on transforming a complex customer journey through an organization.”
This is definitely a leadership philosophy for a new era. It's a 360-degree view of leadership that is more inclusive and more open than what many people have experienced in the past, and it produces results. In less than a year, this collaborative effort at Capital One improved a multitude of customer experiences. For example, customers saved hundreds of thousands of hours of calling time in 2016 as a result of enhanced digital experiences and customer touchpoints. The ratio of customer calls to accounts began a steady downward trajectory to the lowest level since being measured – a major driver of efficiency for the business. At the same time, scores tracking the percentage of people recommending Capital One hit all-time highs.
For Anna Blackburn, “the values match was the biggest driver” in taking her first job with Beaverbrooks the Jewellers, Limited, a family-owned retailer in the United Kingdom. Eighteen years later, these same values drive her as its chief executive officer – their first non-family member, and first female, to hold that position. Honoring values is also at the heart of Anna's Personal-Best Leadership Experience.3
Founded in 1919, Beaverbrooks has a long and honored history. Today it operates seventy stores, has a significant online presence, and employs nearly 950 people. It's not only dedicated to offering customers quality jewelry and watches, it's also very proud of its dedication to a mission of “enriching lives.” Beaverbrooks contributes 20 percent of post-tax profits to charitable organizations, and it invests heavily in its colleagues – which has earned the company recognition by The Sunday Times (Britain's largest-selling national Sunday newspaper) for thirteen consecutive years as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.
Anna's appointment as CEO came at an unsettled time. Her predecessor, a family member, left the company to pursue other ventures. The company had veered away somewhat from its core strategy and culture, and colleagues weren't embracing the new ways. Her fifteen years with the company, however, prepared Anna well for the challenge. Starting on the sales floor, she had served in almost every role and function, worked in locations throughout England and Scotland, and spent five years on the executive team.
None of that meant she could assume she knew what people wanted from her in this new position. One of her first actions was to send out a survey inviting everyone in Beaverbrooks to say what qualities they most wanted to see in the new CEO. At the next annual managers' conference, Anna shared the survey results. People wanted her to be honest, inspiring, competent, forward-looking, caring, ambitious, and supportive, she said, and she pledged to them that she would do everything she could to live up to these expectations.
These actions were an early signal of how Anna intended to be a collaborative and inclusive leader, and her next steps reinforced that aspiration. For example, over the years, Beaverbrooks's operations had become increasingly complicated and formalized, and people had lost a sense of ownership in the business. Instead of introducing any radical new direction, Anna initiated changes that were “always within the context of building on our strengths,” she said.
It was back to the basics and keeping things simple. Where strategies often go wrong is that you lose connection with the person who's going to be making the biggest difference in your business. They needed to buy in and understand the impact they were having.
A major disconnect that Anna observed was that even though Beaverbrooks made The Sunday Times best company list year after year, profits were relatively low. With a firm belief “that being a great workplace and having a great environment should absolutely pay into the bottom line,” Anna set out “to prove that being a great workplace is actually profitable.” However, she wasn't interested in Beaverbrooks being profitable simply for its own sake. She told us that
Beaverbrooks is a business with a conscience. The more successful we are financially, the better we can take care of the people who work for us and the better we can support the wider community. The more successful we are, the more good we can do.
Part of what needed to be done, Anna believed, was to create a greater sense of shared accountability and responsibility: “We needed to have each and every person ready to take their part in making the culture what it needed to be. One person cannot fix, develop, or evolve a culture.” When feedback to the executive level indicated that they worked too much in silos and were disconnected from the stores, Anna introduced new ways to create greater collaboration and synergy. The monthly executive team meetings, for example, became much more focused on strategy, and the quarterly senior manager and corporate office meetings dealt more with operational decisions and with acknowledging the successes experienced in the stores.
Anna also continued the focus group tradition that chairman Mark Adlestone had started: small group meetings of about eight people from similar roles. Annually, she holds fourteen focus groups – six for sales teams, and two each for managers, assistant managers, supervisors, and the office team. The meetings last a half-day, and include discussions of what's working and not working, as well as acknowledgments of individual successes.
Given feedback from the focus groups, Anna devised a new framework for talking about the business, a concept she called The Three Pillars.