Category Archives: Leadership

Do We Really Need Managers?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

There have been SO many articles and books about this idea of flat organizations. No managers, no bosses, just passionate people solving problems and collaborating at ease.

Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re a manager, obviously. But the concept sounds great, right? Less oversight, more trust, more autonomy, we all want that!

What these articles get wrong is this: the idea of managers, especially middle managers, being senseless buffoons or mere pawns with all the authority of a mall cop has gone too far. And the role of a middle manager needs a refresh, not an elimination. Middle managers are the unsung heroes of organizations. But these managers need to be leaders, not just human project management tools.

Where do we stand with managers, today?

The workplace changed a lot during the pandemic. We all came together, huddled from home, turned our kitchen table into a workstation, then our guest room or a corner in our living room to our home office, and overall, stayed productive. In the end, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a person hovering over our shoulder to keep us on track and working. So, logically, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a manager, and a lot of senior leaders felt maybe we could cut out some middle managers.

A survey by GoodHire in 2022, of workers in a variety of fields including education, finance, health care, marketing, and even science- found that 83% of American workers said they could do their own job without their managers. But paradoxically, GoodHire also found that 70% of American workers strongly enjoy or somewhat enjoy working for their manager. This finding is backed up by Pew Research which just released data in late 2023 finding that “a majority of workers give their boss high ratings.”

So, people like their bosses, but could do without them. What’s really going on here?

Why do we hate managers? (or think we do)

The brainless middle manager trope. It’s an old one. They’re in our shows, our movies, our social media posts. And, yeah, in our lives too. They show up late, leave early. They scrutinize everything you do. Track your tasks. Track your productivity. Track your success. Track your failures.

Middle managers today are basically glorified task managers, and that really must change. But…why are they glorified task managers in the first place?

Gallup just published the results of a massive study on managers. A key finding was that, right now, managers have more work to do, on a tighter budget with new teams. Managers are more likely to be burnt out, disengaged, and looking for a new job.

More work: Remember the remote and hybrid culture you probably had to facilitate from scratch with no experience with video software like Zoom and Webex? That was a huge undertaking. Managing people’s well-being wasn’t in the managerial job description before. Adding it may be long overdue, but it was still a task that managers feel ill-equipped to take on officially.

Less budget: The economy was a roller coaster for all industries over the last 4 years. And in response a lot of budgets froze or got tightened. Your company was probably hit in negative ways that affected resources that make your role easier.

New teams: There was a lot of quitting, layoffs, hiring, and job hopping that happened. Now, teams are shaken up, gone, or brand new.

When all these things compound, it makes sense middle managers are feeling squeezed, as Gallup put it.

And when you’re burnt out, disengaged, and looking for the next place to work, you’re going to become the bare minimum “glorified task manager” just making sure the wheels are spinning.

A manager should be a leader. Plain and simple. This isn’t just semantics. A leader is an inspirational figure that facilitates great work. Tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, they can keep track of tasks and you can check them from time to time. But it shouldn’t be the first thing a manager does: check the management software. Instead, check on the people!

What About Manager-less Companies?

It’s worth stating here that, none of this is new. The discussion about whether managers make a difference has been going on for a while, with both sides citing examples to suit their opinion.

On the manager-less company side, Washington-based Valve Software gets cited often. If you’ve ever played some of their most critically acclaimed video games like Half-Life and Portal, you’ve probably heard of them. They also created the Steam platform, which, again if you’re a gamer, you know well. Valve was started by two former Microsoft employees in the early 1990s and began, from the start, as a flat company. No managers, beyond the executive c-suite level. People decided what to work on, what to prioritize, and the company became a huge success. By a lot of metrics, it’s been a success. A little late on deadlines for game releases, but because they are so good, they’re often forgiven.

But here’s where it fell short. Priority is only given to what the majority of the organization prioritizes. At Valve, it was the product, the critically acclaimed games and the Steam platform. What wasn’t prioritized? Diversity. Even for a tech company, even for a gaming company, the demographics are predominantly white and male. This discrepancy came to a boiling point in 2020 when the executive leaders were blindsided by rising social issues and criticized for their silence both internally and externally.

Other companies like Medium and Zappos rolled back their manager-less structures. At Medium, they said the structure-less structure impacted the ability to scale and the time-consuming nature of it all. It also negatively affected recruiting. It all seemed cool, but risky. Zappos said it took the attention away from the customer, and customer service was what they were known for.

These aren’t the only organizations to have ever tried manager-less organizational designs. There’s a whole organization that catalogs them. In total, about 250 companies use a manager-less structure. But most of them have under 50 employees. And nearly all of them started as a manager-less company-they didn’t just wake up and decide their thousands of employees could suddenly manage themselves.

I should be clear: I’m rooting for those places and others to work. I’m in favor of any organization that helps people do their best work. I just personally believe it’s better to bet on talented people and great teams than on a seemingly perfect organizational design.

Managers have a great impact, good and bad

When you think about who your mentors are or people who have impacted you the most in life, outside of your family, I bet you’re thinking of a teacher that really inspired you early in your life, maybe your first basketball coach, or some other authority figure that took the time to understand you and teach you some valuable skills. In other words, you think of a manager.

In organizations, managers make up about 70% of the variance in team engagement. They have a tremendous impact on whether companies succeed or fail. 82% of American workers said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager. The impact and stakes are REAL.

Like it or not, the work we do in our lives defines a big chunk of who we are. And managers really hold the power in making our work fulfilling, or a mindless grind. Right now, things are bleak. The more work, less budget, brand new teams, the burn out. The ripple effects that come from the manager level go so far and so wide. But there is a way to help them.

Employees need more training and paths upward

People who are promoted to managers often are promoted because they are really good at their individual contributor skillset, and the only way to climb the corporate ladder is to get promoted and manage people. Hard truth here: not everyone is cut out to be a manager; not everyone even wants to be a manager.

Gallup found that only 48% of managers strongly agree that they currently have the skills needed to be exceptional at their job. And only three in 10 hybrid managers have received any formal training on leading hybrid teams.

Authors and McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Fieldhave an interesting thought about this in their newest book. Instead of promoting someone who is really good at their craft to a management role, there should be master tracks for technical areas. And putting your best technical person in a management role might drain them of that fire that made them so good in the first place.

Moving up in your company should not be tied exclusively to managing people. And if you promote people to those roles, you need a plan to train them. In fact, before promoting them it’s worth creating a trial project they can manage or put them in charge of interns for a summer. As Bill Schaninger said, “The first time someone does something shouldn’t be after they’ve already gotten the job.”

As a manager, it’s also part of your job (I know, another task, but it’s important) to develop members of your team. Maybe they’ll be managers one day, maybe they’ll even be your manager one day if you train them well enough. Your team is on a path in their career. Their jobs will fluctuate, people will move on, move up, change course, and so coaching them is crucial. Remember, the impact of a manager on someone’s life can be huge. There’s a lot of influence here.

Managers are not task managers, they are leaders.

Focus on the team, not the individual

Now, if you are a manager, it’s imperative that you resist the tendency to micromanage-the feeling of every little task being tracked is likely what created the motivation to fire managers in the first place. So, focus on the team as a whole, not the individual. Great leadership is about letting the team hold itself accountable.

You need to do your one-on-one meetings to check-in with your people and make sure there’s not any glaring individual performance issues. But great leaders are about teaching the team to hold itself accountable. Great leaders often come off more as facilitators who are there to guide and support the team as they divvy up tasks and co-create the best strategy.

Even when you’re doing your individual check-ins, I recommend a 10–10–10 format. If you have 30 minutes to check in with each person every other week, then spend only 10 minutes of that time focused on their actual performance as an individual. Spend the next 10 minutes focused on the team, how the team is supporting them, and how they are contributing to the team. Then spend the final 10 minutes on how you’re doing as their manager. Ask where you could improve and what support they need from you.

No one wants a 30-minute discussion around their performance flaws, but most people respond positively when the bulk of the time is spent focused on how their team and their boss can help them.

Final Thoughts

So, do we really need managers? Yes, but in a capacity that reflects the evolving needs of modern workplaces. As we look ahead, let’s champion a new breed of leaders-managers who not only oversee projects but also empower people, shape culture, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.

Image credit: Pexels, Pew Research

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 16, 2024.

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Strategizing Market Power

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Target Market Initiatives

Strategizing Market Power - Target Market Initiatives

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Market power derives from addressing an urgent mission-critical use case in a particular vertical industry requiring a specialized solution that the incumbent vendors either cannot or will not provide. Power aggregates around a single vendor who is the first to provide an end-to-end solution (what Ted Levitt taught us to call the whole product), typically with the support of partners whom the vendor has recruited to the task. Once success has been verified, prospective customers rally around the new solution, making it the de facto standard for that market segment, effectively excluding all other competition. This dramatically lowers the cost of acquisition and maximizes the lifetime value of the addressable market.

The mechanism for obtaining market power is called a target market initiative. It begins with the selection of a target market segment. Here the criteria for selection are three:

Big enough to matter. The goal is to win well over 50% of the total segment within a three-year horizon, with the resulting revenue providing a material portion of the organization’s total revenue, and an even more meaningful portion of its profit contribution.
Small enough to lead. Again, if your organization is going to win over 50% of the segment within a three-year period, the segment must be small enough to make this feasible given your current size and funding.
Good fit with your crown jewels. To address an intractable problem requires breakthrough capability that others do not have, or what we like to call your “crown jewels.” These accelerate your path to success and provide a barrier to entry to protect your market segment leadership position once it is attained.

The playbook for running a target market initiative is described at length in Crossing the Chasm. It is organized around the following set of factors:

Target Customer. The bullseye target is the business process owner for the broken mission-critical process. They will provide the subject matter expertise. A secondary target is their executive sponsor. They will create budget to fund the effort.
Compelling Reason to Buy. The use case has to be both mission-critical and urgent, in order to overcome a pragmatist’s normal inertial resistance to embracing anything categorically new. Here pain, not gain, is the source of the trapped value that moves the customer to lean in and collaborate, and all your sales and marketing should be focused on the relevant pain points and their remedies.
Whole Product. This is the bill of materials for the complete solution, everything the customer needs to take the problem off the table, with nothing extra added. It is designed backward from the customer’s problem, not forward from your supply chain or your financial goals and objectives.
Partners and Allies. Whatever is on the whole product’s bill of materials that is not provided by your company must come from a partner. One of the functions of a target market initiative is to orchestrate the coming together of such partners to ensure timely delivery of the whole product. The focus is on completing the solution, not adding sales coverage.
Distribution. Target market initiatives require a direct sales channel to execute a consultative sales process, organized around a diagnostic/prescriptive approach, supported by marketing that speaks directly to the business process owner and their executive sponsor. This must not be outsourced, as it is through these direct interactions that you establish your company as the market segment leader.
Pricing. Pricing is value-based, calibrated by the consequences of the current as-yet-to-be-fixed broken mission-critical business process. Discounting is never appropriate as the customer is far more concerned about addressing their urgent needs than saving on the purchase price.
Competition. There are two classes of competitors in play. The first is the incumbent vendor who is not solving the problem satisfactorily at present but who could throw people at it in an attempt to get to “good enough.” The other is a vendor with breakthrough capabilities similar to yours who has not made the commitment to deliver the whole product but who has a partner that might try to do so.
Positioning. You are the breakthrough vendor who has made the whole product commitment, meaning you have demonstrated a deep understanding of the customer’s industry and its problem process, and you have developed a repeatable solution that will get better as each new instantiation leads to more useful features and a more engaged ecosystem of partners.
Next Target Customer. For start-ups, this will normally be an adjacent segment, either a new use case from the same customer base or the same use case from a different segment. For established enterprises whose size dictates that target market segments can never be material to total revenues, winning a target market segment creates a hook for M&A as well as makes you a lot more knowledgeable about which companies are worth acquiring.

Target market initiatives are the most reliable play in the B2B innovation playbook, as witnessed by the staying power of Crossing the Chasm, currently in its fourth decade of being in print, pushing two million copies in total sales worldwide. In closing, then, let me leave you with eight great reasons for building one into your next annual plan:

Gain market adoption for a disruptive technology. This is the classic chasm-crossing play.
Penetrate a new geography. Establish your reputation as a worthy vendor.
Get out from behind the market leader. Gorillas can never defend themselves against highly focused chimps. All they can do is try to isolate you from making any further progress.
Anchor a turnaround. When your enterprise has been on a losing streak, it is critical to “win one for the Gipper.” Target market initiatives are your best bet.
Solve for the “stuck in neutral” problem. When the macro economy is in the doldrums, and customers are slow to buy anything, a truly problematic use case overcomes their hesitancy.
Capitalize on a great niche opportunity. There are use cases where the size of the market is small, but the trapped value is enormous, and you can build a major franchise without ever leaving the segment, as has happened in CAD, Wall Street, health care, and aerospace.
Exploit the “granularity of growth.” In mature markets where average growth rates are in the low single digits, there are always pockets of double-digit growth around problematic use cases. You just need to target them directly.
Capitalize on a market in transition. As markets are working through long-lead transitions, short-term progress can be made locally rather than globally. The evolution of the hybrid workplace would be a current example.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Your Work Isn’t Transformative

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Your Work Isn't Transformative

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Continuous improvement is not transformation. With continuous improvement, products, processes and services are improved three percent year-on-year. With transformation, products are a mechanism to generate data, processes are eliminated altogether and services move from fixing what’s broken to proactive updates that deliver the surprising customer value.

A strategic initiative is not transformation. A strategic initiative improves a function or process that is – a move to consultative selling or a better new product development process. Transformation dismantles. The selling process is displaced by automatic with month-to-month renewals. And while product development is still a thing, it’s relegated to a process that creates the platform for the real money-maker – the novel customer value made possible by the data generated by the product.

Cultural change is not transformation.Cultural change uses the gaps in survey data to tweak a successful formula and adjust messaging. Transformation creates new organizations that violate existing company culture.

If there the corporate structure is unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the power brokers are unchanged, there can be no transformation.

If the company culture isn’t violated, there can be no transformation.

If it’s not digital, there can be no transformation.

In short, if the same rules apply, there can be no transformation.

Transformation doesn’t generate discomfort, it generates disarray.

Transformation doesn’t tweak the successful, it creates the unrecognizable.

Transformation doesn’t change the what, it creates a new how.

Transformation doesn’t make better caterpillars, it creates butterflies.

Image credit: Pixabay

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People Will Be Competent and Hardworking – If We Let Them

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People Will Be Competent and Hardworking - If We Let Them

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Go to just about any business conference these days and you’re likely to see some pundit on stage telling a story about a company — often Blockbuster, Kodak or Xerox — that got blindsided by nascent trends. Apparently, the leaders who rose to the top of the corporate ladder were so foolish they just weren’t paying attention.

These stories are good for a laugh, but they usually aren’t true. People who lead successful companies are, for the most part, competent, hardworking and ambitious. That’s how they got their jobs in the first place. There are, of course, exceptions. People who have a talent for self-promotion can get to the top too.

Still it’s much better to assume competence. That’s how we learn. The truth is that we all get disrupted sooner or later. It doesn’t only happen to silly people. Every square-peg business eventually meets its round-hole world. Smart, competent people fail all the time and, if we want to have a chance at avoiding their fate, we need to understand how that happens.

Mismanagement Myths

During Apple’s rise, Microsoft was considered to be big, slow and incompetent. Its CEO, Steve Ballmer, had foolishly dismissed the iPhone and the company never seemed to gain traction in the mobile world. It launched weak products, such as the Zune music player and the Windows phone. Its failed acquisition of Nokia just seemed to add insult to injury.

Yet still even accounting for Ballmer’s mobile missteps, Microsoft’s business continued to perform well, growing its revenues at double digit rates and maintaining high margins. How can that be? Most of Microsoft’s revenues don’t come from the consumer categories that business journalists tend to cover, but in selling B2B products and services to CIOs. While everyone was focused on gadgets, it was building a monster business in the cloud.

When you look more closely, the clever pundits often miss the real story. Blockbuster didn’t ignore Netflix, but executed a viable strategy and still failed. Kodak didn’t ignore the market for digital cameras, in fact its EasyShare line were top sellers. Unfortunately, selling digital cameras couldn’t replace the profits from developing film. Yes, Xerox PARC failed to successfully market the PC, but its invention of the laser printer saved the company.

The reason why pundits tell the caricatures rather than the real stories is that imagining CEOs to be fools makes us feel better about ourselves. After all, if only foolish people get disrupted, then we—assuming we are not fools—should be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. Being smart and working hard won’t save you.

Why Do Smart, Competent People Fail?

There are many reasons why smart, competent people fail. A very common one is a category error. For example, Steve Ballmer didn’t think anyone would pay $500 for a phone, but the iPhone wasn’t just a phone, it was an entirely new business model and ecosystem. People would not only pay for it differently (through their mobile plan), they would also use it very differently than earlier phones.

That opens up a very different set of issues. How do we know if we’re making a category error? We put things into categories for a reason, to understand their relations to other things. For example, a plate is something that goes on a table. But sometimes, such as the case with a commemorative plate, they go on a wall. So when does a plate become commemorative?

Other famous failures ran into similarly thorny issues. The CEO at Blockbuster, John Antioco, developed a viable strategy and executed well, but failed to gain alignment among important stakeholders. Kodak marketed digital cameras, but they weren’t nearly profitable enough to replace developing film. Xerox PARC was designed to build the “office of the future,” not to market consumer products like the Macintosh.

What at first might seem like CEOs asleep at the wheel actually exposes some very thorny issues. How much alignment do we need before pushing an important strategy forward? What do you do when your cash cow dies? When you shoot for the moon, how should you hedge your bets?

These are tough problems with no obvious solutions. But notice that when we assume that the leaders were competent, it forces us to think about them much more seriously and, hopefully, learn something useful.

Seeing Competence All Around Us

I was recently talking to my friend Bob Burg, co-author of the Go-Giver series, and something he said reminded me of a short Borges essay I’ve long admired, called Borges and I, in which the acclaimed author writes about the challenges of balancing a public persona with a private one. I brought it up during our conversation and promised to send it to him.

The whole essay is just two short paragraphs of Borges comparing himself, who drinks coffee and walks the streets of Buenos Aires, to the famous author who will live on in posterity. “Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, in sending Bob the essay, I screwed up. Because it was so short, I didn’t send a link but copy-pasted the text into the body of the email and, carelessly, didn’t include the title or the author’s name, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. Most people would have just written it off as something stupid. Bob did something different.

Instead of imagining me a fool, he humbly wrote me back, apologized for his inability to understand the essay and asked if I could explain it to him, which gave me the opportunity to correct my mistake. In doing so he did both of us a service. He got the small benefit of reading an interesting essay and I got the enormous gift of being able to redeem myself.

When we assume those around us are competent—not stupid or lazy—we do far more than give them the opportunity to be their best selves. People who feel validated actually tend to perform better too.

We Are Always Wrong

We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes in our own story. Unlike others, we are witnesses to our internal process and get to observe our logic develop. So our thoughts makes perfect sense to us and it can be incredibly frustrating when others don’t see it as we do. Our inclination is to imagine them to be fools, simply incapable of grasping basic concepts.

That’s why pundits tend to tell such facile stories. Blockbuster wasn’t paying attention to Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Xerox PARC invented breakthrough products, but neglected to market them. None of these stories are accurate, but it’s far easier to portray a failure as a silly blunder, than admit to ourselves how easily it could happen to us.

The hard truth is that we’re always wrong. Sometimes we’re off by a little and sometimes we’re off by a lot, but we’re always wrong. We succeed not by coming up with the “right” idea from the start, but by taking a Bayesian approach and becoming less wrong over time.

The best way to do that is to assume other people are smart, competent and hardworking. Lazy fools will make themselves obvious soon enough. But by seeking out intelligence and virtue, we are not only much more likely to find it, but also to identify and correct deficiencies in ourselves and our thinking.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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The Experience Nexus

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Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

The Experience Nexus - Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, merely meeting expectations isn’t enough; delivering exceptional experiences is the non-negotiable standard. Customers demand seamless, intuitive journeys. Employees seek engaging, meaningful work that fosters growth. Partners require transparent, collaborative relationships that drive mutual success. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I advocate for a truly holistic approach: the Experience Management Office (XMO). However, an XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards. This integration forms a dynamic “experience nexus” of feedback and action, ensuring that experience strategies are not just internally conceived, but genuinely co-created and reflective of the voices that matter most.

The Strategic Imperative of the Experience Management Office (XMO)

Historically, organizations managed customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and often partner experience (PX) in isolated silos. This fragmented approach frequently led to inconsistent experiences and missed opportunities for cross-functional improvements. The XMO emerges as the strategic orchestrator, unifying these disparate efforts under a single, cohesive umbrella. Its core mandate is to ensure consistency, proactively identify and eliminate friction points, and drive continuous improvement across all critical touchpoints for every stakeholder. An effective XMO establishes robust methodologies, deploys standardized tools, provides clear governance, and acts as a central repository for all experience data, translating raw insights into prioritized, actionable initiatives.

“An XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards.”

Amplifying Voices: The Power of Advisory Boards

While the XMO provides the essential strategic framework and operational discipline, advisory boards inject the authentic, ground-level voice of your critical stakeholders. They offer invaluable qualitative feedback that complements quantitative data.

Customer Advisory Boards (CABs): Comprising your most engaged and influential customers, CABs provide unfiltered feedback on product utility, service delivery, and overall brand perception. They offer a direct window into evolving customer needs, emerging pain points, and often highlight competitive shifts or significant unmet market opportunities. Their strategic input can be a game-changer for product roadmaps and service enhancements.
Partner Advisory Boards (PABs): For organizations deeply reliant on a robust ecosystem of distributors, resellers, integrators, or technology alliances, PABs are indispensable. They offer critical insights into channel effectiveness, the viability of joint go-to-market strategies, and operational friction points that directly impact mutual profitability and success. A strong PAB can foster greater collaboration and loyalty.
Employee Advisory Boards (EABs): Your employees are the living embodiment of your organization’s culture and processes. They are on the front lines, experiencing internal systems and customer interactions firsthand. EABs provide invaluable, real-time feedback on workplace culture, operational inefficiencies, the effectiveness of internal tools, and the direct impact of leadership decisions on morale, productivity, and retention. They serve as both early warning systems and fertile ground for grassroots innovation within the Employee Experience (EX).

The Experience Nexus: From Feedback to Breakthrough Innovation

The true magic of this holistic model is realized when the XMO functions as the intelligent central hub, systematically receiving, synthesizing, and acting upon the rich insights generated by these diverse advisory boards (the strategic spokes). This creates a dynamic, continuous improvement loop, and crucially, an engine for genuine innovation. The XMO’s role goes beyond just operational excellence; it becomes a powerful catalyst for change. By gathering and cross-referencing insights from all three boards, the XMO can identify truly breakthrough opportunities that a siloed approach would miss. It’s in the intersection of these diverse perspectives that the most profound insights for innovation emerge.

Structured Feedback Ecosystem: The XMO establishes formalized, yet flexible, processes for advisory boards to submit feedback. This ensures insights are consistently captured, meticulously categorized, intelligently prioritized, and seamlessly routed to the most relevant internal product, service, or operational teams.
Holistic Data Synthesis & Analysis: The XMO’s analytical capabilities are crucial here. It collates and cross-references qualitative insights from the advisory boards with quantitative experience data (e.g., NPS, CSAT, CES, employee engagement scores, churn rates, partner revenue contribution). This holistic analysis identifies systemic trends, uncovers root causes, and validates hypotheses across the entire experience landscape.
Actionable Insights & Strategic Prioritization: Armed with synthesized, validated data, the XMO plays a pivotal role in guiding leadership to prioritize experience initiatives. It ensures resources and effort are strategically allocated to areas that will deliver the most significant, cross-cutting impact across customer, employee, and partner journeys, driving maximum business value.
Innovation Acceleration: This is where the nexus truly shines. The XMO facilitates cross-functional “insight sharing” workshops, where product, engineering, and design teams are exposed directly to the synthesized feedback. For example, a common pain point from a Customer Advisory Board might be the lack of a specific feature, while an Employee Advisory Board highlights a related internal operational inefficiency, and a Partner Advisory Board reveals a similar competitive gap. When these three insights are combined, they don’t just solve a single problem; they can reveal a massive market opportunity for a new product, service, or business model. The XMO’s role is to identify and champion these “aha!” moments, channeling them directly into the innovation pipeline.
Transparent Closed-Loop Communication: Perhaps most critically, the XMO champions and facilitates regular, transparent communication back to the advisory boards. This demonstrates precisely how their invaluable feedback is being utilized, outlining the tangible progress of implemented initiatives, and celebrating the impact of their contributions. This transparency is vital; it builds deep trust, reinforces the perceived value of their participation, and encourages continued engagement.

Case Study 1: Global SaaS Provider – Unifying the Ecosystem Experience

From Fragmented Insights to Integrated Ecosystem Enhancement

A global B2B SaaS company faced challenges with inconsistent product adoption and suboptimal channel partner engagement. Their existing structure meant customer feedback was managed by the CX team, HR handled employee surveys, and the partner team conducted informal check-ins. This siloed approach led to fragmented insights and disjointed solutions, impacting their overall ecosystem health.

Recognizing the need for a unified strategy, they established a dedicated Experience Management Office (XMO) reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer. The XMO’s clear mandate was to integrate and elevate all experience initiatives. Concurrently, they formalized their existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and launched a new, strategically focused Partner Advisory Board (PAB). The XMO developed a comprehensive quarterly insights report, meticulously combining feedback from the CABs, PABs, and internal employee surveys. A consistent, critical theme emerged from this integrated analysis: the onboarding experience for new customers and channel partners was clunky, inconsistent, and often frustrating across different product lines.

Leveraging this precise feedback, the XMO facilitated cross-functional workshops involving product development, sales, marketing, and customer support teams. This collaborative effort led to the rapid development and deployment of a unified onboarding platform and standardized, role-based training modules. The XMO rigorously tracked key metrics such as “time-to-first-value” for new customers and partner activation rates. Within 18 months, customer satisfaction scores related to onboarding surged by 25%, and partner-led sales increased by a remarkable 15%, demonstrating the profound, tangible benefits of integrating diverse external and internal voices through a centralized, action-oriented XMO.

Key Takeaway: A centralized XMO, fed by structured CAB and PAB insights, can drive enterprise-wide improvements in critical customer and partner journeys, leading to measurable business growth.

Addressing Inherent Challenges and Ensuring Success

Integrating an XMO with robust advisory boards, while incredibly powerful, is not without its inherent hurdles. Proactive mitigation strategies are essential:

Securing Executive Buy-in: This foundational step requires senior leadership to not only champion the XMO’s creation but also to genuinely value and act upon the feedback from advisory boards. Mitigation: Develop a compelling business case, demonstrate clear ROI by linking experience improvements directly to key business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, retention), and involve executives directly in initial board meetings.
Resource Allocation: Establishing, staffing, and effectively maintaining both a strategic XMO and active advisory boards demands dedicated human and financial resources. Mitigation: Start small and iterate. Begin by focusing on the most critical experience touchpoints, prove incremental value, and then scale resources as the benefits become undeniable and quantifiable.
Preventing “Feedback Fatigue”: Advisory board members are busy, valuable individuals. Ensuring they feel their time is genuinely valued and their feedback consistently leads to tangible action is paramount. Mitigation: Maintain rigorous closed-loop communication, provide transparent updates on progress, celebrate their contributions publicly, and respect their time with concise, focused agendas and clear pre-reads.
Translating Insights into Action: Moving from qualitative feedback to concrete, measurable organizational actions can be complex and requires strong analytical and change management capabilities. Mitigation: The XMO must employ robust analytics, facilitate strong cross-functional collaboration to dismantle silos, and define clear ownership for implementing improvements.

Case Study 2: Regional Retail Bank – Synergistic Employee & Customer Elevation

Transforming Branch Operations Through Integrated Feedback

A prominent regional retail bank was grappling with a concerning decline in customer satisfaction related to in-branch service, compounded by alarmingly high employee turnover, particularly among its front-line tellers. Despite various internal initiatives, leadership struggled to pinpoint the true underlying root causes of these intertwined problems.

In response, the bank strategically established an XMO reporting within its operations department. Crucially, they simultaneously launched an active Employee Advisory Board (EAB), comprising a diverse cross-section of tellers, branch managers, and key back-office support staff. The EAB quickly identified several critical pain points: severely outdated core banking software leading to protracted transaction times, unclear escalation paths for complex customer issues, and insufficient, infrequent training for new product offerings. In parallel, the bank’s existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) provided consistent feedback echoing concerns about excessive wait times, perceived inconsistencies in service quality, and a lack of personalized interaction.

The XMO proved to be the indispensable bridge. It meticulously analyzed the EAB’s feedback on software inefficiencies and training gaps, cross-referencing it with the CAB’s complaints about wait times and service quality. This integrated analysis revealed a direct, causal correlation: internal operational friction points directly translated into poor customer experiences. The XMO then championed a high-priority, cross-departmental project to modernize the core banking software, streamline digital workflows, and introduce a comprehensive, tiered training program for all branch staff, directly based on EAB recommendations. Regular, transparent updates on progress were provided to both advisory boards, reinforcing their critical role. Within a single year, teller turnover decreased by a remarkable 20%, and customer satisfaction with in-branch service experienced a significant, measurable improvement, unequivocally validating the transformative power of integrating direct employee insights into holistic customer experience enhancements.

Key Takeaway: Integrating EAB insights with CAB feedback via an XMO reveals systemic issues, leading to co-created solutions that dramatically improve both employee and customer experiences.

Conclusion: The Future of Holistic Experience Leadership

The strategic integration of a proactive Experience Management Office with thoughtfully structured Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards represents the pinnacle of human-centered innovation and leadership. This powerful nexus creates a robust, empathetic, and continuous feedback ecosystem that not only informs and validates but also dynamically refines an organization’s entire experience strategy. It ensures that all strategic decisions and operational improvements are profoundly grounded in real-world perspectives, fostering deeper trust across all stakeholder groups, accelerating the pace of meaningful innovation, and ultimately driving sustainable, differentiated growth. For leaders aspiring to truly excel in the experience economy, this holistic, integrated approach is not merely an option—it is an undeniable imperative. It’s about orchestrating a diverse symphony of voices to create a harmonious, compelling, and continuously improving experience for everyone involved, building loyalty and advocacy from the inside out.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to shape the article and create the illustrative case studies.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Unblocking Change

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Unblocking Change

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want things to change, you have two options. You can incentivize change or you can move things out of the way that block change. The first way doesn’t work and the second one does. For more details, click this link at it will take you to a post that describes the late Danny Kahneman’s thoughts on the subject.

And, also from Kahneman, to move things out of the way and unblock change, change the environment.

Change Blocker 1 – Metrics

When you measure someone on efficiency, you get efficiency. And if people think a potential change could reduce efficiency, that change is blocked. And the same goes for all metrics associated with cost, quality and speed. When a change threatens the metric, the change will be blocked. To change the environment to eliminate the blocking, help people understand who the change will actually IMPROVE the metric. Do the analysis and educate those who would be negatively impacted if the change reduced the metric. Change their environment to one that believes the change will improve the metric.

Change Blocker 2 – Incentives

When someone’s bonus could be negatively impacted by a potential change, that change will be blocked. Figure out whose incentive compensation are jeopardized by the potential change and help them understand how the potential change will actually increase their incentives. You may have to explain that their incentives will increase in the long term, but that’s an argument that holds water. Until they believe their incentives will not suffer, they’ll block the change.

Change Blocker 3 – Fear

This is the big one – fear of negative consequences. Here’s a short list: fear of being judged, fear of being blamed, fear of losing status, fear of losing control, fear of losing a job, fear of losing a promotion, fear of looking stupid and fear of failing. One of the best ways to help people get over their fear is to run a small experiment that demonstrates that they have nothing to fear. Show them that the change will actually work. Show them how they’ll benefit.

Eliminating the things that block change is fundamentally different than pushing people in the direction of change. It’s different in effectiveness and approach. Start with the questions: “What’s in the way of change?” or “Who is in the way of change?” and then “Why are they in the way of change?” From there, you’ll have an idea what must be moved out of the way. And then ask: “How can their environment be changed so the change-blocker can be moved out of the way?”

What’s in the way of giving it a try?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.

Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Convinced that Strategic Foresight shows you a path through uncertainty? Great! Just don’t rush off, hire futurists, run some workshops, and start churning out glossy reports.

Activity is not achievement.

Learning from those who have achieved, however, is an excellent first activity. Following are the stories of two very different companies from different industries and eras that pursued Strategic Foresight differently yet succeeded because they tied foresight to the P&L.

Shell: From Laggard to Leader, One Decision at a Time

It’s hard to imagine Shell wasn’t always dominant, but back in the 1960s, it struggled to compete. Tired of being blindsided by competitors and external events, they sought an edge.

It took multiple attempts and more than 10 years to find it.

In 1959, Shell set up their Group Planning department, but its reliance on simple extrapolations of past trends to predict the future only perpetuated the status quo.

In 1965, Shell introduced the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool to predict cash flow based on current results and forecasted changes in oil consumption. But this approach was abandoned because executives feared “that it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

Then, in 1967, in a small 18^th-floor office in London, a new approach to ongoing planning began. Unlike past attempts, the goal was not to predict the future. It was to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future.”

Within a few years, their success was obvious. Shell executives stopped treating scenarios as interesting intellectual exercises and started using them to stress-test actual capital allocation decisions.

This doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly embraced or even believed the scenarios. In fact, when scenarios suggested that oil prices could spike dramatically, most executives thought it was far-fetched. Yet Shell leadership used those scenarios to restructure their entire portfolio around different types of oil and to develop new capabilities.

The result? When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil prices quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel, Shell was the only major oil company ready. While competitors scrambled and lost billions, Shell turned the crisis into “big profits.”

Disney: From Missed Growth Goals to Unprecedented Growth

In 2012, Walt Disney International’s (WDI) aggressive growth targets collided with a challenging global labor market, and traditional HR approaches weren’t cutting it.

Andy Bird, Chairman of Walt Disney International, emphasized the criticality of the situation when he said, “The actions we make today are going to make an impact 10 to 20 years down the road.”

So, faced with an unprecedented challenge, the team pursued an unprecedented solution: they built a Strategic Foresight capability.

WDI trained over 500 leaders across 45 countries, representing five percent of its workforce, in Strategic Foresight. More importantly, Disney integrated strategic foresight directly into their strategic planning and performance management processes, ensuring insights drove business decisions rather than gathering dust in reports.

For example, foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing (remember, this was 2012) and that consumers wanted more control over when and how they consumed content. This insight directly shaped Disney+’s development.

The results speak volumes. While traditional media companies struggled with streaming disruption, Disney+ reached 100 million subscribers in just 16 months.

Two Paths. One Result.

Shell and Disney integrated Strategic Foresight differently – the former as a tool to make high-stakes individual decisions, the latter as an organizational capability to affect daily decisions and culture.

What they have in common is that they made tomorrow’s possibilities accountable to today’s decisions. They did this not by treating strategic foresight as prediction, but as preparation for competitive advantage.

Ready to turn these insights into action? Next week, we’ll dive into the tools in the Strategic Foresight toolbox and how you and your team can use them to develop strategic foresight that drives informed decisions.

Image credit: Gemini

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Getting Back to Measuring What Matters

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Getting Back to Measuring What Matters

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted,” is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, which I think aptly sums up the past 40 years. Since the 80s, we’ve been laser-focused on numbers and missed the underlying math. We’ve become finance-obsessed but lost track of economics.

Consider Jack Welch, who Fortune magazine named “Manager of the Century.” In the article explaining why he deserved such an honor, it lauded the CEO’s ability to increase the stock price and deliver consistent earnings growth, but nowhere did it refer to a breakthrough product or impact on society.

There’s a good reason for that. As NY Times columnist David Gelles explains in, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Welch increased profits largely by firing workers, cutting investment and ‘financializing’ the firm. During his 20 year reign, innovation faltered and the company produced less, not more. Clearly, we need to reevaluate what we consider valuable.

What’s The Purpose Of A Company?

In a famous 1937 paper, Ronald Coase argued that the economic function of a firm was to minimize transaction costs, especially information costs. For example, it makes sense to keep employees on staff, even if you might not need them today, so that you don’t need to search for people tomorrow when important work needs to be done..

In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling built on Coase’s work in their groundbreaking paper entitled The Theory of The Firm, which asserted that the purpose of the firm was to make money for its owners. They further argued that there is a fundamental principal-agency problem between managers and owners because their interests are not perfectly aligned.

These were brilliant works of economic theory, but as reflections of reality they are somewhat absurd. People start businesses for all sorts of reasons, profits being just one motivation. That’s why we have public benefit corporations and socially responsible investment funds. Heirs such as Abigail Disney have spoken out strongly against corporate greed.

There is simply no basis for the notion that owners of businesses care only about profits, much less the stock price over a given period. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s there was a growing conservative intellectual movement that argued that managers had a moral responsibility to increase shareholder value at the expense of pretty much everything else.

Today, many portray the conservative movement behind the nation of shareholder value as evil and greedy. Most of the evidence indicates that its leaders thought they were doing the right thing. It seems that there were more fundamental errors at play.

Management By Algorithm

In the 1920s , a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, became enamored by an idea that came to be known as logical positivism, that human affairs should be subjected to the same logical rigor as physical sciences. It failed miserably and, when Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in 1931, it was completely discredited.

Yet the strain of thought that arose in the 1970s that gave rise to Jack Welch’s brand of capitalism was essentially the same thing. It was, in effect, management by algorithm, in which human agency was eschewed and decisions were boiled down to a single variable to be optimized. Pretty much everything else could be blissfully ignored.

Does a particular action further the mission of the enterprise? It doesn’t matter as long as the stock price goes up. Will a merger of two companies undermine market forces and restrain trade? Unless regulators can prove that prices will go up, they have no right to step in. What should govern relations between nations? They should simply pursue their interests.

These ideas failed for the same reason that the original theory of logical positivism did. The world is a messy place, with lots going on. You can’t simply boil complex problems down to a single variable—or even a limited set—and not lose important information in the process. The notion that you could was naive and reckless.

The Cost Of Carelessness

To understand why the Welch era went so badly, let’s look at one common practice that took hold in the 1980s and 90s: Offshoring. From a shareholder value perspective, it has an intuitive logic. You move your factory from high wage countries such as the US to low wage countries such as China and pocket the savings. You lower costs and increase profits, at least in the short-term.

Yet that analysis omits some important factors. First of all, it undermines trust among employees, suppliers and other partners when relationships are treated as purely transactions. Also, a Harvard study found that moving the factory floor thousands of miles away from R&D reduces knowledge transfer and has a negative effect on innovation.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how this played out at GE. The company became more profitable, but less productive. For decades, it failed to innovate. Its last major invention was the CT scanner, which came out in the 1970s, before Jack Welch took the helm. Today the company is worth about $60 billion, roughly the same as back in the 90s.

The results for society are just as clear. Our economy has become markedly less productive, less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. Life expectancy in the US has decreased in a number of years over the past decade. Anxiety and depression, which have been rising for a while, accelerated during the pandemic.

Creating Mission-Driven Organizations

The statistician George Box famously said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful” and that’s especially true of economic models. When Ronald Coase argued that the “nature of a firm” was to reduce transaction costs, he didn’t mean that was the only purpose of an enterprise. To argue that there is a principal-agent problem between owners and managers should not imply that it only applies to profits.

In fact, as Andrew Winston and Paul Polman explain in their book Net Positive, many practices that aren’t sustainable depress profits in the long run. Running an enterprise that dismisses the interests of customers, partners and communities is destined for trouble. Sooner or later, there will be a reckoning.

In the final analysis, the purpose of an enterprise is its mission. When we think of great founders such as Henry Ford, Sam Walton and Steve Jobs, they had vastly different purposes in mind, but it was fulfilling that purpose that drove profits. Ford was passionate about the power of transportation. Walton was fanatical about serving the customer. Can you imagine what Steve Jobs would have said about an ugly product that could make him a lot of money?

That’s what we’ve gotten wrong over the last 50 years. We’ve been counting the wrong things. Economics should serve people, not the other way around. The success of a society needs to be measured by the well-being of those who live in it. If companies profit, but our people are impoverished, our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated, we live unhappy lives and die deaths of despair, what have we really gained?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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The Unsung Heroes of Culture

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Employee Experience Advisory Boards and the XMO

The Unsung Heroes of Culture - Employee Experience Advisory Boards and the XMO

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

We live in an age where the war for talent is fiercer than ever, and employee engagement surveys, while useful, often feel like a lagging indicator. Organizations are realizing that a truly thriving culture isn’t built from the top down alone, nor can it be accurately measured by a single annual pulse check. To genuinely understand and nurture the employee experience, you need to go beyond surveys. You need a dedicated, empowered voice from within the ranks: the Employee Experience Advisory Board (EXAB).

For too long, the ‘people’ aspect of business has been relegated to HR, often seen as a cost center rather than a strategic imperative. But the truth is, the employee experience *is* the customer experience. It *is* the innovation engine. And it *is* the foundation of a resilient, high-performing organization. This is where the EXAB, working hand-in-hand with an Experience Management Office (XMO), becomes not just a nice-to-have, but a strategic necessity.

Why an Employee Experience Advisory Board?

An EXAB is a diverse group of employees, representing various levels, departments, and demographics, who serve as a living, breathing feedback loop for the organization. They are the frontline observers, the informal leaders, and the unvarnished truth-tellers who can articulate the nuances of the daily employee journey. Their value stems from several key areas:

Authentic Insights: Surveys tell you *what* happened; an EXAB tells you *why* and *how it felt*. They provide qualitative data that quantitative metrics often miss.
Early Warning System: They can spot emerging issues, potential pain points, and cultural shifts long before they escalate into widespread problems.
Design Thinking in Action: By involving employees in the design of their own experience, you foster a sense of ownership and co-creation. This moves beyond ‘listening’ to ‘co-creating.’
Bridging the Gap: EXABs serve as a crucial bridge between leadership and the broader employee base, fostering trust and transparency.
Innovation Catalysts: A positive employee experience directly fuels innovation. Engaged employees are more likely to contribute ideas, take risks, and collaborate effectively.

Integrating with the Experience Management Office (XMO)

While an EXAB provides invaluable insights, these insights must be acted upon systematically. This is where the Experience Management Office (XMO) comes in. An XMO is a centralized function dedicated to orchestrating, measuring, and improving all experience touchpoints – be they customer, employee, or partner. When an EXAB and XMO collaborate, a powerful synergy emerges:

The EXAB identifies opportunities, pain points, and innovative solutions directly from the employee perspective.
The XMO then takes these insights, analyzes them within the broader experience ecosystem, prioritizes initiatives, allocates resources, and implements changes. They provide the strategic framework and operational muscle.
The EXAB, in turn, can serve as a testing ground for proposed solutions and provide real-time feedback on their effectiveness, ensuring that changes resonate with the employee base.

Think of it this way: the EXAB are the eyes and ears on the ground, providing rich, contextual intelligence. The XMO is the brain and hands, translating that intelligence into actionable strategy and execution across the entire experience landscape. Without the EXAB, the XMO risks making decisions in a vacuum. Without the XMO, the EXAB’s valuable insights might remain unacted upon.

Case Studies in Collaboration: EXAB + XMO in Action

Case Study 1: “Ignite” at a Global Tech Giant

A major technology company, facing increasing attrition rates and feedback indicating a disconnect between leadership vision and daily employee reality, established an EXAB they called “Ignite.” Comprising 25 employees from diverse roles, Ignite met monthly with the newly formed XMO. One of Ignite’s early observations was a pervasive feeling among junior engineers that their ideas weren’t heard and that career progression was opaque. The XMO, informed by Ignite’s granular feedback, launched a series of “Innovator’s Guild” workshops, providing a structured forum for idea submission and mentorship. Simultaneously, they revamped career pathing resources and introduced a transparent internal mobility portal. Within 18 months, not only did attrition rates for junior engineers drop by 15%, but the company also saw a 20% increase in patent submissions directly linked to ideas generated through the guild. The EXAB’s qualitative insights directly fueled the XMO’s strategic interventions, leading to measurable improvements in both culture and innovation output.

Case Study 2: “CareConnect” at a Healthcare Provider

A large healthcare network, grappling with burnout among its nursing staff and a perceived lack of voice, established “CareConnect,” an EXAB specifically for frontline healthcare professionals. Their XMO, initially focused primarily on patient experience, quickly realized the inseparable link between employee well-being and patient outcomes. CareConnect highlighted critical issues such as inefficient shift scheduling, inadequate break facilities, and a desire for more mental health support. The XMO, leveraging this input, implemented a new AI-driven scheduling system that gave nurses more control, redesigned break rooms into “recharge zones,” and launched a comprehensive mental wellness program with on-site counselors. The impact was profound: a 10% reduction in nurse turnover, a significant improvement in patient satisfaction scores (as reported in post-visit surveys), and a visible boost in staff morale. This case demonstrates how an EXAB can pinpoint specific, actionable improvements that directly impact both employee well-being and core business objectives, with the XMO providing the structured approach to scale and sustain these changes.

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

The establishment of an EXAB, seamlessly integrated with an XMO, signals a fundamental shift in how organizations approach culture. It moves from a reactive, survey-driven approach to a proactive, co-creative one. It’s about empowering employees not just to report problems, but to be part of the solution. It’s about creating a living, breathing mechanism for continuous cultural improvement.

In a world of constant change, the most resilient and innovative organizations will be those that prioritize the human experience at their core. The Employee Experience Advisory Board and the Experience Management Office are not just strategic tools; they are the architects of a future where work isn’t just a place we go, but a place where we truly belong, contribute, and thrive. If you’re serious about creating a culture that attracts, retains, and inspires the best, it’s time to unleash the power of your people through these vital structures.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to shape the article and create the illustrative case studies.

Image credit: Unsplash

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