I recently had the opportunity to sit down with David Cote, former CEO of Honeywell and current CEO of Vertiv, to talk about his book Winning Now, Winning Later. Ever since I read it, I’ve found this book very inspirational and full of great practical suggestions for leadership.
His book focuses on why so many companies think short-term when they need to think both short-term and long-term at the same time. David says the reason this happens is that it’s hard to approach both short- and long-term goals at the same time. Most companies believe they have to choose between short-term gains or long-term stability and tend to choose short-termism rather than doing the hard work of learning how to do both.
While at Honeywell, David’s leadership strategy was threefold: to reduce accounting and business practices down to what is real, invest in the future but not excessively, and grow while keeping fixed costs constant. This strategy aimed at making short-term wins while simultaneously making improvements that would pay off in the long term.
Relating this to customer experience, he suggests that most companies miss the mark because they don’t listen effectively to what their customers want. They go through several levels of reporting, which can cloud what customers are actually saying, and this severely limits their ability to make both short- and long-term adaptations.
To avoid this issue, David recommends that high-level managers and even CEOs like himself do skip-level meetings and talk directly to people like call center operators or even directly with a sample of clients. This can help leaders understand what’s really going on and get in touch with the actual needs and frustrations of their customers so they can design better solutions for them.
He told one excellent story that illustrates this perfectly.
As CEO of Honeywell, David wasn’t content to stay in his office and the board room and listen to reports. He wanted to speak directly to customers and find out for himself what the company could improve. On one visit to an important aerospace industry customer, he received a huge shock. While his sales team had thought the client was simply dragging their feet on a new deal, the CEO told him they were about to sue his company for non-performance on their contract. No one on his side had any idea this client was so unhappy with their service!
If any company was lucky enough to have David Cote run their customer service operation, here’s how he would apply his winning strategy. First and foremost, he’d aim to truly understand what the customer wants and needs by bypassing sales and consulting reports and actually going straight to a sample of customers. In this way, he’d identify customer values.
Next, he’d create a metric for each identified value – metrics that could be truly measured and are robust. But over time, people learn to manage the metrics and show improvement when there is actually no underlying improvement in performance. So, these metrics would also need to be constantly audited to ensure their continued accuracy.
As a third step, David says he’d find the processes that drive each metric and map these processes step by step to find points where efficiency and effectiveness could be improved. These improvements should actually be felt by customers.
Finally, he’d close the loop by going back for customer feedback. He’d go directly to customers to find out how they feel things have changed and what can still be improved. Then, iterate to continue this process again and again to ensure things improve for the customer.
David’s hands-on, no-nonsense leadership style is something that all business leaders can learn from. Rather than sitting back and letting people tell him what’s happening, he has always pushed for proof, investigated reasoning, and challenged assumptions in order to produce the best results possible. This has helped his companies avoid getting stuck in short-termism and work on both short- and long-term goals simultaneously. And that’s what makes him a truly inspiring leader and business thinker.
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Blake Morgan is a customer experience futurist and the bestselling author of The Customer of the Future. For regular updates on customer experience, sign up for her weekly newsletter here.
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