Unintended Leadership

Most of the lead­er­ship mis­takes I’ve seen didn’t come from bad intent.
They came from good intent that drifted.

Ear­ly in my career, I sat in count­less board­rooms where the data screamed the same thing: we weren’t tak­ing care of our cus­tomers. It was a clear prob­lem to be solved. Nat­u­ral­ly, as lead­ers, we’d shift into ​“cri­sis mode,” roll up our sleeves, and ask: 

We’d gath­er the feed­back, look at the ​“bru­tal facts,” and set a goal. We’d decide to move the cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion score from X to Y. It’s a per­fect­ly rea­son­able out­come met­ric—until it isn’t.

The trou­ble starts with how that goal trav­els through the orga­ni­za­tion. By the time it hits the front lines, the mes­sage has mutat­ed. It shifts from ​“Improve the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence” to ​“Improve the num­ber”.

We’ve all been on the receiv­ing end of that shift — where it becomes painful­ly obvi­ous the per­son serv­ing you isn’t try­ing to improve your stay or your meal, they’re just try­ing to ​‘check the box’ on a metric.

This is what I call Unin­tend­ed Lead­er­ship.

Sud­den­ly, your team isn’t focused on the per­son stand­ing in front of them; they’re focused on mak­ing you hap­py. They’re obsessed with avoid­ing the ​“red num­ber” on the dash­board because they’re par­a­lyzed by the fear of miss­ing the tar­get.

Recent­ly, one of our team mem­bers shared a pho­to from a hotel they were stay­ing at. I’m sure it came from a good place. But the hotel had gone down that same road. Sub­tle reminders. Not-so-sub­tle reminders. Lit­tle nudges about how impor­tant the rat­ing was.

And instead of feel­ing tak­en care of, the guest felt pressured.

The Score is Just Smoke; The Feed­back is the Fire

About a decade ago, while work­ing with teams at the con­sult­ing firm Bain on a Net Pro­mot­er Sys­tem imple­men­ta­tion in one of my clients, I kept hear­ing the same warn­ing: Don’t fall in love with the score.

The score is just an indi­ca­tor. The real val­ue is in the com­ments. The pat­terns. The sto­ries that tell you what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing in the experience.

When lead­ers focus on the num­ber instead of the sig­nal, they teach the orga­ni­za­tion — with­out mean­ing to — that the num­ber mat­ters more than the customer.

That’s the real dan­ger of unin­tend­ed leadership.

Chal­lenge:

• Where might your lead­er­ship have unin­tend­ed consequences?

Addi­tion­al Resources:

• The Most Dan­ger­ous Place for a Com­pa­ny to Get Stuck
• How Are You and Your Orga­ni­za­tion Doing? A Check-up From the Neck Up
• Keep­ing Your Eye on the Growth Prize: How Not to Get Dis­tract­ed in the Chaos of Growth
• Are You Obsessed With Your Customers?