Are you a new Chief Experience Officer (CXO)? Or a veteran CXO looking for ways to continue to sharpen your skills? If so, I just finished a book you might like: The Chief Customer Officer Playbook by Rod Cherkas (https://rodcherkas.com/)
In the book Rod shares a CXO maturity model that highlights eight key skills & behaviors every CXO needs to drive impactful change.
The skills are categorized into four main categories:
1️⃣ Organizational impact
🔸Cross-functional partnerships
🔸Communicating & storytelling
2️⃣ Customer impact
🔹Connecting with customers
🔹Thought leadership
3️⃣ Strategic impact
🔸Strategic thinking
🔸Change management during scale
4️⃣ Operational impact
🔹Maximize opportunities during economic uncertainty
🔹Optimize metrics that matter
If you’re overwhelmed reading that list & not sure where to begin, you’re not alone!
🎇I would recommend starting with the cross-functional partnership skill. Meeting with leaders from key functional departments is the best way to break down silos & better understand the challenges those teams are facing.
Ask those leaders:
❓What their team’s goals are for the year
❓What projects excite them
❓What big hairy problem they haven’t had the time or energy to tackle
❓How you or your CX team can be in service to them
🤝 Asking how you can be in service to another team is a strategy that has always served me well in the past. It tends to disarm people; they start to see that you’re there to collaborate, co-create, & learn alongside them vs. telling them what they’re doing wrong or what extra work they need to be doing.
🎭 As you continue to meet with the cross-functional leaders, building their trust, ask if you could join one of their team meetings for 10 min. In that time take the opportunity to share a “CX Roadshow”:
🔰 A few slides that help define CX at your organization (e.g. CX vision statement, service stds, brand promises/values, etc.)
🔰Connect the dots between CX & their team goals, as well as the corporate strategy
🔰Show how their team can partner with CX (give very specific, everyday examples, making it tangible for them)
🔰How they can support CX in the org, start by soliciting their CX improvement ideas
Once you’ve started to build those cross-functional partnerships, I would recommend working on the “Connecting with customers” skill next. 💞