Do you know what your “red threads” are? 🖍
I just finished the book Love & Work by Marcus Buckingham. In it Marcus uses the term “red threads” to describe work you do that:
🖍Brings you joy & fills your cup
🖍You lose track of time when doing it
🖍Delivers value to others
🖍You feel mastery or in complete control when doing it
🖍Puts you into “flow” or “the zone”
🖍You look forward to doing & you never want it to end
🖍Inspires you to develop a new way of doing things
🖍You voluntarily do it
He shared a study from the Mayo Clinic that showed as long as 20% of your workdays are filled with “red thread” activities you are more likely to avoid burning out. Even though the percentage is probably lower than you expected, the most important thing is that you experience a “red thread” each & every workday. Meaning you can’t try to renew yourself by only doing “red thread” activities on the weekends & expect to beat burnout.
After I finished the book, I started thinking about how many organizations build customer experience strategies that have nothing to do with their unique “red thread” 🖍 – causing confusion & frustration for their customers.
It’s easy to see how it can happen, organizations are trying to keep up the latest CX trends or replicate what their competitors are doing. Everyone is in a race to find that one magic CX activity that will solve all their customer problems.
I would encourage organizations to ask themselves the following questions – to get clear on how their new CX initiative fits into their “red thread”.
🖍“How does this deliver on our CX vision?”
🖍“Does this align with our unique brand promise?”
🖍“Is this something that will solve a customer pain point or satisfy a customer need?”
🖍“Does this initiative create excitement in our internal team?”
Is your organization unclear about what their “red thread”🖍 is to begin with? Try asking these questions:
🖍“How does our organization uniquely delight customers?”
🖍“What naturally draws customers to us?”
🖍“What themes do we see in unsolicited customer feedback (e.g. letters, social media posts, reviews, etc.)”
🖍“What are we passionate about solving for customers, because we know how important it is to them?”
Here’s to living in a world where more people & organizations are spending time with their red threads! 🖍
(Grateful for this beautiful quilt, from my husband’s paternal grandmother, that kept me cozy while I was reading. Think of how differently this quilt would look without its red pieces?!) 🛋