In this post I want to return to Ken Blanchard and his book The Heart of a Leader, which I have found to be an excellent read and chock full of wisdom and inspiring guidance. Specifically, I want to focus on the following quote, “Successful organizations today have a triple bottom line – very much like a three-legged stool. The three legs of the stool are Raving Fan customers, gung ho people, and financial strength. All three legs have to be strong for the stool to stand. If you focus on only one leg, the stool will fall. Even if you focus on two legs, but forget the third, the stool will still fall.” The relationship to this quote and leadership, quite simply, is that successful leaders understand and live this quote.
The tendency for many is to focus most heavily on the fiscal leg of this stool, tightly embracing the forever need to grow revenue and reduce expenses. Although a critical part of an organization’s ability to remain viable and have the necessary resources to further the organization’s mission, I consider this the hierarchical third leg on the stool. The second leg, which is somewhat interchangeable with and codependent on the third, in my view of things is the staff/volunteer leg of the stool. If you do not have a staff functioning as a team and if you do not have elected/appointed volunteers also functioning as a team and the two functioning together as a total team, it has been my experience that the greatest success become largely unachievable. In its absence, staff silos evolve, Board splintering occurs, and one heck of a lot of energy goes into infighting and turf protecting as versus innovating the effective strategies that will propel an organization and its mission forward. That leaves one additional leg, superlative customer service, which I view as the absolutely critical leg on this stool. Organizations and companies exist to fulfill a need … to provide products and services that a body of individuals need and want. Fulfilling the value needs of an individual is a significant reason for that individual continuing to seek the products and services provided by an organization or company. But a part of meeting the value needs of an individual or a whole community of people is to accompany that product or service with the highest order of customer service. This is what people want; this is what brings them back again and again. Blanchard provides yet another aspect of this in the following quote, “The best definition of profit I’ve ever heard is that it is the applause you get for satisfying your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.”
If you invest heavily in the staff & customer service legs of the stool, the fiscal leg will evolve on its own and continually strengthen. If you instead invest heavily on the fiscal leg … the other two legs will weaken; too heavy of a focus on growing revenues dwindles the staff’s focus on team functioning and on customer service … which ultimately negatively impacts the fiscal leg. It is my sense that the ticket to fiscal strength is not in how many products or services you can evolve and take to market, but in how many “Raving Fan customers” you can create. And the road to achieving that lofty goal is in the staff you hire, the example you set for them, the values you instill in them, and the focus you give them. A “one for all and all for one” attitude and a true and compassionate belief in customer service within every member of a staff will yield the higher-order successes that will elevate an organization to ever higher levels of mission fulfillment.
Although agreeing with Blanchard on the necessary three legs of the stool and the reality that all three require attention if desired results are to be achieved, I feel that there is a hierarchical order in the way that attention should be allocated and in the degree to which that attention should be applied. Superlative customer service and evolving a motivated and customer-service-focused total team are primary … together, they will yield fiscal growth and stability. That said, I find it interesting that Blanchard listed the three legs of this stool in the order in which he did in the first quote and the fact that he lumped together customer service and a motivated staff in the second. Perhaps we are looking at this through very similar eyes?
Author Cross-references:
Ken Blanchard: Also see posts 9/10/09, 3/29/10, 5/11/10
Key Word Cross-references:
Customer Service: None
Inspiration/Motivation: Also see posts 1/16/09, 2/3/09, 2/18/09, 2/25/09, 5/17/09, 6/5/09, 6/26/09, 9/9/09, 2/18/10, 2/24/10
Team: Also see posts 1/13/09, 2/18/09, 4/20/09, 8/3/09, 1/6/10, 5/26/10
Values: None
Workplace Environment: Also see posts 12/12/08, 1/28/09, 2/6/09, 2/19/09, 7/7/09, 8/3/09, 9/9/09, 1/6/10
on Leadership ... by Steven Davis, CAE 
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