The Monday Rethink: What CEOs can learn from their own employees and customers
CEOs' most important sources of intel lie right under their nose.
A curious professor, eager to learn about Zen, visits a wise Zen master. As soon as he arrives, the professor starts bombarding the master with his own ideas and knowledge.
The master listens patiently, then offers to make tea. He pours the tea into the professor's cup, but doesn’t stop when the cup is full. Tea overflows, spilling all over the table.
The professor, startled and frustrated, shouts, "Stop! The cup is overflowing! No more will go in!"
The master smiles and says, "Exactly. Your mind is like this cup—overflowing with your own thoughts. How can I teach you Zen unless you empty your cup first?”
In a way, this Zen parable talks about all of us — and how hooked we are on our own concepts and ideas. But one category that I find is most at risk of an ‘overflowing cup’ is CEOs.
Think about it: everyone looks at them to help them make meaning of the current environment, to provide direction and ideally serve up all the answers on a silver platter.
Often, CEOs are tempted to think they made it to the top thanks to their expertise. And it’s precisely this mindset of expertise and know-it-all that can create a lot of distance between them, their frontlines and their ultimate customers.
So today I thought I’d share a couple of stories of CEOs who emptied their cup and set about learning through direct contact with customers and employees.
But before I do that, let me tell you why this matters so much to me. Check out where the ‘customer’ and the ‘workforce’ rank in the top of CEO and CFO priorities:
Enough said. We need to go back to the fundamentals of empathy.
After he was named CEO of T-Mobile US, John Legere began listening in daily on customer service calls. That made a splash in the press at the time, but it wasn’t merely a PR stunt. Legere learned a fundamental truth about the wireless industry: People hated it. They resented being trapped in confusing contracts and hit with hidden fees.
So he decided to offer clear service plans and transparent charges, among other innovations—in short, to become everything the industry wasn’t - a concept he called ‘the un-carrier’. Oh, and did I mention that led to T-Mobile doubling the customer base during his tenure?
Then you have Benedetto Vigna, the new CEO of Ferrari, who started waging a war on what he dubbed the company’s “bureaucratic mass index” after having spoken to 300 employees in every imaginable role.
He said: “Some consulting company offered to help me. But the best consultants of a company are the people themselves.”
[Can someone please frame this quote?!]
Since Vigna’s first day on the job in 2021, Ferrari’s stock price has nearly doubled, and the company has outperformed the rest of the world’s biggest automakers.
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And finally there’s the CEO of Southwest Airlines, Gary Kelly, who cautioned:
"The higher you go, the more you must rely on other people, and if you're smart, you will listen to them."
Indeed, many of Southwest Airlines' best strategies come from the front lines, he says, such as the "Bags Fly Free" campaign, a masterstroke in purpose-based brand marketing strategy.
Here is my parting shot: We don’t have to be CEOs to remember the overflowing tea cup. Results only start to show when we remember to revisit and stress-test our fixed assumptions; and ‘get our hands dirty’ at the coalface of real-life contact with the people we most want to impact.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
(S. Covey)
Stay fierce & curious!
Alina
ps: I’m mindful my CEO examples feature three white men, and welcome any additional examples that would help to diversify my pool.