Leadership Can't Be Measured by Applause

In May, I spoke before the Ohio Chapter of the Project Management Institute. One of my comments evoked a lively debate with the attendees on one side and myself on the other.

 

I was talking about the importance of confidence in leaders. During this part of the presentation, I said, “You should not overly solicit customer suggestions or ‘constructive criticism’.”  The argument that I was making was that leaders must lead and not be overly subservient to the wishes or whims of their customers, employees or other constituents. You can’t measure leadership by applause.

 

Winston Churchill said that the populace will never be able to look up to a politician who is kneeling down to place his ear to the ground. John F. Kennedy said that he was not elected to office to become a seismographer of the public mood. The populace most respects institutions that are managed by leaders whose decisions are not designed to reflect the popular will. In The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria wrote that the three most respected institutions in America—the military, the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve—are not democratic but they demonstrate leadership.

 

According to my Theory of Customer Malleability, customers do not know what they want. Their buying decisions are more a function of persuasion, influence, and social pressure than internalized desires. (Eric Hoffer said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.) The link between internalized desires and buying decisions is bracketed by what is available. Customers are particularly bad at providing insight into new product initiatives. Henry Ford said that had he surveyed the population about what they wanted in transportation, they would have lobbied for “faster horses”.

 

Since there are often big gulfs between what customers say they want and what they buy, basing product development decisions on what customers say they want is risky. Encouraging customers to free associate the kaleidoscope of possibilities untethered to the practically of delivering such products to the market is often a futile exercise.

 

I believe that it is far better for an organization to assess what its customers and potential customers are actually doing. This information should be collected from the variety of touch points—e.g. sales and customer service—that the company already has with its customers. When well-run companies want to know what is on their customers’ minds, they shouldn’t have to put them in a sterile room with a swinging light bulb.

 

The following are some of the reasons I believe that relying heavily on customer surveys is a mistake:

 

• First, conducting customer surveys is expensive and time-consuming. While most professional surveys are outsourced, the sponsoring company still must dedicate substantial resources to providing insight into the survey design, desired learnings and interpretation of collected data.

 

• Second, obtaining an accurate read on customers’ thoughts is nearly impossible because customers’ responses can be swayed by one word or by the order in which the questions are asked. Some have compared trying to read customer sentiments to the soothsayers of yesteryear who tried to divine meaning from chicken entrails. Consider how one word conjures up drastically different recollections in this real-world exchange: 

 

Lawyer to Witness:   How fast was a car traveling before it ran into a telephone pole?

 

Witness:   45 miles per hour.

 

Lawyer to Witness:   How fast was the car traveling before it smashed into the telephone pole?

 

Witness:   65 miles per hour

 

Of course, the integrity of customer surveys can be compromised when the wrong people are surveyed as well as when the right people are surveyed in the wrong setting. The fact that respondents to many surveys are self-selecting is one instance of how the surveys are skewed. Sometimes, asking the same people the same question at different times of the day— or before or after a meal—will yield different responses.

 

• Third, customers do not want to be bothered answering surveys. Being requested to complete a survey that takes longer than the delivery of the service in question is annoying. Just the act of sending a customer a survey can so greatly annoy some customers that the company’s brand will diminish in the perspective of many customers. Customers will often race through surveys just to get them over with. Their haphazard responses are a precursor to the collateral damage that will result from relying on such feedback.

 

• Fourth, being overly solicitous of feedback will inevitably result in criticism. (Unwarranted criticism is most likely to be evoked when people in a group believe that their ability to criticize is a sign of their intelligence.) A serious problem arises when this criticism shakes the employees’ confidence. If salespeople hear this criticism, they risk becoming demotivated and therefore, less effective.

 

• Fifth, it is important to realize that some customers are not worth having. The peril in soliciting extensive feedback is that the most critical and demanding suggestions are likely to come from customers who offer the company diminishing prospects for profitable returns. 

 

• Sixth, customers who are only moderately disappointed with a company become irate when their concerns are not addressed. Thus, companies that rely on extensive surveys are faced with a dilemma: either bend to the customers’ wishes or suffer their wrath when failing to do so.

 

A similar problem arises with focus groups. In many cases, a dominant personality takes over and discourages others from expressing opinions that deviate from his.

 

All of this is not to say that there is no merit in conducting customer surveys. One often overlooked benefit of conducting customer surveys is that they can be used to justify terminating employees (e.g. when customers are consistently disappointed with a customer service representative’s service).

 

Some of the most revealing customer surveys can be quite simple. I believe that there is a lot of merit in Fred Reichheld’s idea that customer surveys designed to measure customer satisfaction with an existing product or service can be distilled down to one question: “Would you recommend our service to your friends and colleagues?” The reason this is such a powerful question is that it gauges whether or not customers like your product enough to put their own reputations on the line with their friends and colleagues.