Love your customer

Central to the high-performance approach is a commitment to understanding the customer. What problems are they facing that you can solve? What problems are they facing that you're creating? And above all: What is it that they care about (and are therefore willing to pay for)?

If you can keep doing things that customers care about enough to pay for (with as little 'packaging' that they want to discard) - your organisation will thrive.

Long-term success therefore involves using our natural capacity for empathy, and our natural curiosity about other people, to get into the customer world.

It also involves being systematic in capturing and sharing this knowledge. That means not letting it get stuck on the 'front line' without penetrating the bubble of the leadership team, and it also means not letting it get stuck in silos.

One way of characterising love, at a cognitive level, is to see it as a process:

• Forming an idealised picture of the beloved based on currently available facts

• Being attracted to that idealised picture

• Drawing nearer to the beloved

• Discovering more and having the idealised picture tested

• Accepting the new information

• Repeat

To be in love is to go round this cycle repeatedly, forming an ever higher fidelity picture. And it never stops. Even in a long-term relationship, there can still be more to discover. People change, or have hidden sides or opinions they have long kept to themselves. Indeed, people sometimes talk about the ability of a partner to somehow continue to surprise even after many years or decades.

And obviously, this parallels our relationship with our organisation's customers. Even if we think we know them well, they might change. If we stop finding out more about them, then the relationship will drift and fray.

So, in a funny way, there is a great romance at the heart of business - the love affair with the customer.

This may all sound obvious - but how often do you see organisations failing to do this, in ways big and small? If this was easy, everyone would be doing it, and the world would be full of seamless and elegant user experiences. But it isn’t. It is in fact a continual challenge to look beyond your own experience (internal to the organisation), to your customer’s experience - and it is the work of leaders to frame this challenge.

This is another reason why having good relationships within your organisation is so important. It's not just that it helps create better communication and better co-creation within the organisation. Inviting your team to 'switch on' their relational intelligence also invites a better relationship with your customers.