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What should we measure? Have any of you seen the movie with Tom Cruise called ‘Jerry Maguire’, where he plays the sports agent? And there’s that one scene when he’s holding the phone and he’s screaming into the phone. “Show me the…” The ultimate financial objectives in business have to do with money. Show me an increase in top line revenue. Show me a boost in bottom line profit. Show me more share of wallet, market share, shareholder value. Show me the money. And that’s a valid thing to measure. But with regards to service excellence culture, it’s a lagging indicator. In other words, it happens after all the service that you’ve already given. So, okay, what would be a leading indicator? How would you know you’re going to get the money? What would you get prior to the money that would let you know it’s going in the right direction?

Well, you’d be getting really good scores. Your customer satisfaction score would be going up. Your customer effort score be going down, your net promoter score be going up, your wallet allocation score is going to be going up, Your employee engagement score is going to be going up. If all your survey scores are going up, are you going to get the money? Yes, you will. It’s a leading indicator. But you don’t survey every day. And even if you do, you don’t look at those reports all the time. So what would be a leading indicator that would let you know that you’re going to get good scores? How would you already have your finger on the pulse of how we’re doing, how we’re doing, how we’re doing, how we’re doing, that would give you confidence that you’re going to get higher scores? Well, that’s your compliments and positive feedback. If you’re getting a lot of pat on the back, if you’re getting five star reviews, if you’re getting lots of thumbs up. If your employees are saying to each other, “Oh, wow, thanks.” If your customers are saying “I appreciate, oh!” You’re going to get the score, you’re going to get the money. Does this make sense so far? Alright.

Then the leading indicator of the money is the score. The leading indicator of the score is the compliments. What’s here? What needs to happen here that will result in someone giving you a compliment? Will people give you a compliment for doing what they expected? Hello? So you will not get a compliment for hitting the service level agreement. They expect you to. It’s an agreement. You’re not going to get a compliment for following the operating procedure because you were doing it before. It’s normal. Then how do you get a compliment? Somebody has to look at the service you provide and the experience you’re creating from a different perspective and come up with some new ideas. And then you’re going to have enough ideas that you can get rid of the bad ones and cultivate the good ones and rank them and evaluate them and prioritize and improve them. And some of those ideas you put into action. If your culture is generating lots and lots and lots of new ideas which lead to many, many, many insights, ideas, then you can choose ones and put them into action. Because if you’re doing this enough, it will drive all that.

Now, here’s the problem. Which of these four do senior leaders tend to spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about? Which of these four is where every single person in your company could actually do something every day? But does your company measure that? Do you have a goal, a target, or any kind of tracking system whatsoever for how many new insights are we going to look at this month about what we already do? How many new ideas have we generated? Are we challenging ourselves to generate? Must we generate before we sit down and then evaluate the ideas and prioritize ideas and choose some ideas and pick a few ideas and put them into action? Do you measure that? Could you?