Loyalty Leader Mindset
"It's not enough that your customers love you, they have to love you." –Catherine Nelson, Executive Leadership Consultant
The paradigm we choose greatly influences how we see and react to the world around us. The loyalty leader mindset can be expressed as follows:
I earn the loyalty of others by empathizing with them, taking responsibility for their needs, and being generous.
So whose job is it to inspire employees to do good work for customers? You can say, “The manager, of course.” There is no doubt that the team leader is the linchpin – the leverage point – for creating a team culture and inspiring everyone to do their best for customers. But what if you don't have an inspiring team leader? Can you make a real difference in your team's ability to retain customers? The answer is most definitely Yes . And not just in your own engagement with customers, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, in your interactions with other members of your team.
“Leadership is a choice, not a position,” liked says our company co-founder, Stephen R. Covey. Society may give you a title, but that doesn't make you a leader. As one of our clients said, “You are not the leader you think you are. You are the leader your people think you are. ”
Anyone can adopt a loyalty leader mindset. You don't need an official title. You can be the most experienced executive in the company or the cashier who was just hired yesterday. No matter. A loyalty leader earns the loyalty of others by living the principles that recognize their value and limitless potential. An assistant hairstylist's assistant in a hair salon can be true to the mindset of the loyalty leader if they are trustworthy, responsible, and generous in their dealings with customers. Similarly, the CEO can be a loyalty leader if they practice empathy and take ownership of customer issues.
Leaders must choose to adopt this mindset. In fact, too many officially appointed leaders operate under an ineffective, even harmful paradigm. You may have heard that “people don't leave companies; they left their manager. Research confirms this. According to Gallup, “Managers account for at least 70% of variation in employee engagement scores across business units. This variation is in turn responsible for the very low employee engagement worldwide. »
Are you a leader who retains your employees and customers?
To change employee behavior, engagement and loyalty, the leader's mindset and resulting behaviors have to change. Many managers get their jobs because they're technically skilled, but they may not have learned how to model, teach, and reinforce the behaviors necessary to earn the loyalty of others. Employee loyalty comes from genuinely caring about their thoughts and ideas, sincerely wanting to understand their goals, and then helping employees achieve them. It comes from wanting to appreciate employee contributions.
Just as true loyalty comes from feelings deep within you, the power to inspire loyalty also comes from deep within you. It's basically a matter of the kind of person you choose to be.
You will find that winning the heart of every customer and colleague starts with you.
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How can you win the loyalty of your colleagues and customers?
Principles govern the world. Gravity is a principle that works on us, whether we like it or not. Even if we choose not to believe it and jump off a building, we will still fall. Likewise, the principles apply to everyone, regardless of our background, life experience or beliefs. Principles also govern our relationships with people. If we ignore or violate these principles, we will fail. The three fundamental loyalty principles for earning loyalty in any relationship are:
Empathy
Responsibility
Generosity
True loyalty is the natural consequence of principled behavior. Principled behavior builds loyalty much more effectively than rewards points or promotions. Through our research, we have found that customers and employees are loyal to organizations and people who empathize with them, take responsibility for their work, and act generously. These are not just techniques, they are behaviors that can be learned and adopted by anyone in your organization.
Loyalty Principle 1:Empathy
We earn the loyalty of our customers and colleagues when we have empathy for them – the power to not only hear what they say, but to feel what they feel. We shift our thinking from apathy to empathy. To show empathy, we need to do these two things:
Make a real human connection. We are loyal when we connect with people in a warm, caring, and positive way. Authentic connections can turn a group of disengaged workers into a truly customer-centric team.
Listen to learn the hidden story. Listening to understand is the key to empathy. We build loyalty with our customers and colleagues by listening to truly learn the needs, concerns and stories of others. We treat people differently when we know their stories, often kept hidden until others feel comfortable enough to share them with us.
Loyalty Principle 2:Accountability
We are loyal when we take ownership of what needs to be done. We don't just give people what they ask for; instead, we own objectives and results for our clients and colleagues. We actively teach others how to take responsibility themselves. To take responsibility, we need to do these two things:
Discover the real work to be done. What people are asking for may not be what they really need. A customer in a hardware store asks to buy a key. Unless we know what job they want the key to do, we don't know what key they need or if they need a key. To serve a client or colleague responsibly, we need to ask thoughtful questions so we know what work they need us to do for them.
Follow-up to strengthen the relationship. We strengthen the relationship by following up. It shows that we care about the customer or colleague experience and want to learn from it to improve. Uncovering problems is a particularly good time to demonstrate our commitment to doing things right and exceeding expectations.
Loyalty Principle 3:Generosity
We earn loyalty when we are generous with others. By giving from our hearts and giving more than is needed or expected, we turn customers and colleagues into champions . We're excited to find ways to make other people's lives easier and better. To be generous with others, we must do these two things:
Share your ideas openly. We share ideas and information that help others learn and improve. Driven by a spirit of genuine generosity, feedback is considered a gift. Sharing our knowledge to help customers solve a problem can engender an intense sense of loyalty.
Surprise with unexpected extras. We are constantly experimenting with new, creative ways to show people that we care. We offer “extras” that cost little – send personal messages, remember names, test new surprises. Simple things like these can endear us to our customers and associates.
If you're wondering if empathy, accountability, and generosity are really core principles of loyalty, imagine doing the opposite. Imagine treating everyone apathetically, irresponsibly, and selfishly . It's been done - in fact, it's been done all the time - but it's not going to retain us. In fact, it drives customers and employees away. If we intentionally focus on following these principles of loyalty, we will earn loyalty as a matter of course. Loyal customers and colleagues will naturally appeal to us.
What happens when we adopt a loyalty leader mindset
Whether we have a formal leadership role or not, we become a loyalty leader when we embrace the loyalty leader mindset, then model, teach, and reinforce the three core principles of loyalty. If we are in a customer orientation role, by making a few simple gestures that turn ten customers a day towards real loyalty, in one week, we have created seventy new promoters! And if we manage ten employees who, by making a few simple gestures, turn ten clients a day towards true loyalty, we create a hundred new lawyers every day! Creating new advocates every day lays the foundation for becoming a loyalty leader.
We've worked with thousands of organizations around the world, and here's what we know:customer and employee retention is a absolutely critical to long-term success. Perhaps it would surprise you to know that working hard to earn the loyalty of others can also make you a happier, more fulfilled person. We challenge you to commit to living the principles of empathy, accountability, and generosity in your own life and taking your team for the ride. It doesn't matter who you are – a CEO, a division manager, a team leader or anyone facing the customer – you meet the needs of others and you need their loyalty. It doesn't matter where you go or who you serve – imagine what would happen if you practiced these principles at home. The tenets of loyalty are the same.
Model, Teach, Reinforce, and Hire for Loyalty
How do you instill these tenets in a team? Earning loyalty is more than giving lessons in good service techniques. It's more than giving everyone a copy of Customer Service For Dummies and order the team to smile and say, “Have a nice day.” Your challenge is to model, teach, reinforce and hire for the principles of fidelity.
Modeling. You may be thinking to yourself, “I am already empathetic. I am responsible and generous. Or you may feel committed to developing these behaviors in yourself. As a result, you can be a role model for your team members, and they benefit more than anything. Of course, none of us are as good at living by these principles as we could be, and few of us consciously focus on them, making them the foundation of our lives. So your first challenge is to do that – to become even more of the empathetic, responsible, and generous person that you can be. Most of us still have a long way to go. But that should not discourage us. We can be more deeply good. We can listen better. We can make others feel more valued. And in doing so, we become the example, the model what it takes to win the loyalty of others.
Teaching. Most of us work in teams, so the second challenge is to build a team around us that also lives by these principles. If you are an individual team member, you can live by these principles and teach others by example. "I'm not a teacher", you say? Yes you are. You can't help but be a teacher:your example influences the behavior of others all day long. If you're a manager, you're actually a teacher, whether you like it or not. Plus, there are real benefits to becoming a good teacher. On the one hand, you are the manager:your team members will pay attention when you teach because they know if you value these principles, they must do the same. Biggest Benefit:When you teach a principle, you possess, you internalize it, you learn the most. The principle is part of you.
Strengthen. The third challenge is to reinforce the principles of faithfulness – all the time. When you praise a team member for showing accountability, that's reinforcement. When you notice that team members are less than empathetic, you pull them aside and gently remind them of the principle. When you see a generous act, you celebrate it with the team and say, “Now this is what we want to see!” Here are some reinforcement tips you can apply to every lesson in this book:
Have regular and frequent loyalty meetings (which we describe in the next section).
Recognize team members who share and help build loyalty. Try to catch them in the act and celebrate it. You'll encourage others to do the same and create a culture where loyalty behaviors are continually celebrated. List your customer and employee retention metrics. Do they improve as your team members share their insights and act on them? As you celebrate team members' success in upholding the Loyalty Principles?
Coach individuals privately on ideas for retaining customers and colleagues.
Hiring. If you are able to hire, loyalty principles should be your primary criteria for onboarding people to the team. For example, Progressive Insurance changed its claims adjuster hiring profile from “cop/investigator” to “nurse.” According to Jim Collins, business researcher and author, the most important thing to look for in a new hire is “alignment with your ideology and core values.” In your case, that means hiring empathetic, responsible, and generous people. You start by moving forward if they are already living by these principles. When interviewing candidates, ask for examples from past experiences where their actions demonstrated each principle. For example, “Please tell me about a time when you showed empathy for a client and the impact it had. Please tell me when you took personal responsibility for a problem with a customer, and it earned that customer's loyalty. »
Even if you have no control over hiring, remember that you still have control over the most important ingredient for retention:your own behavior and the example you set for your team.
