If you want to deliver first-class results for shareholders, have your middle manager’s role focused on stakeholders – which includes customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders. For this piece, I’ll focus on Customers and Employees, where the greatest value is to be found.
Value Creation
This new middle manager role is not the top of a silo, as the old role used to be. It is there to create value, by providing first-class customer service, also called customer centricity. This requires that the old silos now disappear and instead cooperate with each other to provide that service, whether for external or internal customers. This is a business-wide necessity and requires close cooperation across functions, delivering hugely impressive results – in B2C companies, the highest level of customer centricity can deliver 1.8 times revenue growth and twice the market share growth as companies that do not have this focus.
Employees
This new role also requires the middle manager to act as a coach for employees, imparting new skills and demonstrating the value that comes from delivering satisfied and loyal customers. We know that for the implementation of AI to be successful, the adoption by all employees is paramount and this can only come by the right level of support being given to the individuals who will do the work. Without this support, the risk of failure is high.
This focus on training and coaching has much wider benefits. By working to ensure employee success, low and behold – their motivation and level of engagement get a significant and lasting boost. And what does this engagement get – highly engaged teams report 26% higher profitability, significantly lower levels of turnover and 10% higher customer loyalty. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236927/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx
And – you know what, if you get the focus on the key stakeholders, customers and employees, the results in financial terms will satisfy the most demanding of shareholders!
