Customer focused leadership learning framework
There has been good progress in recent years in developing frameworks for leadership competencies. However, only a limited amount of work has been done on the curriculum required to develop some of the new qualities, skills and expertise required of leaders across public services to drive reform and improve service delivery. These requirements include a greater focus on the user or customer, and on cross-sector partnerships and procurement.
To address this gap, the Public Services Leadership Consortium has overseen the development of a learning framework and suite of learning resources for customer focused leadership, based on research undertaken by Professor Ivan Robertson and Elisabeth Henderson.
Learning framework
The learning framework comprises three stages. These are:
Pre-requisites: organisational and individual readiness
Participants need to be ready for a development programme. This can be addressed by ensuring suitable nomination or selection procedures; relevant prior training and development, and relevance to personal career stages and plans.
Their organisations also need to be ready for participants to put their learning into action. Key issues will include the relevance of the learning to the strategic goals of the organisation; the existence of opportunities to implement and embed the new learning; existing organisational culture, and the existing position of the organisation on the spectrum of customer focus.
Seven distinct learning areas
- Understanding the spectrum of customer focused services - dealing with tensions in definitions and terminology, and awareness of the distinctive context of public service, with an appreciation of where their organisation might lie on this spectrum.
- How to assess and analyse who their customers are, what drives customer satisfaction and what they value about the service. This includes methods and approaches to facilitate taking the customer's perspective, and how to encourage staff to identify with the customer's experience. It includes how leaders make strategic, symbolic acts that will promote the value, brand and ethos of the organisation as one that takes customer focus seriously.
- How to re-align whole organisation systems and processes to deliver better customer focus , which organisation systems and process are their key priorities, inter-organisation interventions and a knowledge of methods for preparing and supporting employees through this re-alignment. This includes means of working across complex partnerships and landscapes, from a radical customer perspective.
- How best to enhance the motivation and well-being of staff to deliver excellent customer service, including the concept of the 'satisfaction mirror' and the underlying evidence in support of it. This includes how to measure and diagnose employee satisfaction, motivation and performance and useful interventions to address problems - the aim being to align employee and customer satisfaction.
- How to use the local and the wider 'authorising' environments to lever and effect change, including methods for empowering employees without abdicating responsibility and maintaining leadership accountability; and how to shape the organisational culture and climate to sustain value-driven change.
- How best to set strategic leadership attention to the middle and junior management activities that will ensure desired behaviours and achieve results, including the distinctiveness of a) customer relations management and b) leadership for reform and customer focus ; and how to communicate a leadership passion for customer focus across the organisation.
- How to develop and use entrepreneurial skills of commercial awareness, innovation and flexibility to procure services across a complex service delivery landscape, optimising opportunities for better value to the customer.
Transfer and embedding
Organisational readiness, and ongoing support and contact outside the organisation - planned well ahead of time, and adequately resourced - are crucial to effective transfer and embedding of learning. Approaches such as action-learning sets, coaching or mentoring can provide effective support. A means of building a critical mass of leadership or change agents within the organisation may be needed.
