Cupola CX

Just wrapped up my 2024 reading challenge! Here are some of the books that shaped my thinking on leadership & customer experience this year: 📚 Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Watkinson) 🔹Emotions drive decisions more than logic - design experiences that make customers feel valued 🔹The best CX happens when you reduce customer effort, not just delight them 🎯 Experience Rules! (Magers) 🔹Co-creation wins – involve customers to craft meaningful solutions 🔹Measure what matters to customers, not just what's easy to track 📊 Chief Customer Officer Playbook (Cherkas) 🔹Build feedback loops between customer insights & product teams 🔹Customer success is everyone's job, not just a department ⚡️ Essentialism (McKeown) 🔹Less but better - the power of extreme selectivity 🔹Say "no" to good opportunities to make room for great ones (protect your “yes”) 🤔 Power of Regret (Pink) 🔹Regret is a powerful teacher – it helps us make better decisions 🔹"If only" thoughts can spark positive change when channeled properly 💡 Hidden Potential (Grant) 🔹Reframe mistakes – they are springboards to success 🔹Look beyond IQ – grit, curiosity, & collaboration are the fuel of achievements 🚀 Multipliers (Wiseman) 🔹Great leaders amplify others' intelligence instead of showcasing their own 🔹Be a challenger & ask better questions, it pushes people to grow 🎯 Right Kind of Wrong (Edmondson) 🔹Three types of failures – basic, complex, or intelligent. Aim for more intelligent failures 🔹Psychological safety drives innovation 💬 Think Faster, Talk Smarter (Abrahams) 🔹Structure your communication using the PREP model: point, reason, example, point 🔹The best responses often start with a pause – it provides clarity & confidence ❤️ Love + Work (Buckingham) 🔹Find your “red threads” (what you love) & weave them into what you do 🔹Excellence comes from amplifying strengths, not fixing weaknesses 🎯 Power of Alignment (Labovitz) 🔹Align strategy with people (vertical axis) & your processes with your customers (horizontal axis)   🔹Complete alignment = your strategy & your employees are coordinated with customer focus & process capabilities 🌟 The 5 Resets (Nerurkar) 🔹Small habit changes can create profound resilience 🔹Sustainable performance requires intentional & frequent recovery What books changed your thinking this year? 

As you reflect back on 2024 this week, it's a great time to start planning for 2025! The new year brings all of us a fresh start, what better time to get together with your colleagues & co-create a team canvas (developed by Alexey Ivanov & Dmitry Voloshchuk). If you’ve never led a team canvas workshop, here are some strategies I’ve used: The What: A collaborative exercise to build the team’s: ❤️Purpose 💎Values 🏆Goals 🗺Annual roadmap 🛠 Role clarity 💪Strengths/opportunities (using Gay Hendricks The Big Leap: Zone of Genius quadrant) 📣Communication & meeting preferences The How: 📊 Use templates from Miro or Mural. Break up the board into sections, giving each team member 2-5min per section to populate with their ideas. Invite each person to share their ideas. Have the group vote on the collective ideas to find the gravity in the room & craft a final list based upon the full team’s input. ➡ This exercise provides you, as the leader, with a good window into each team member’s level of collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, communication style, aversion to conflict, etc. 🚪 As a follow-up session to the team canvas exercise, I ask each team member to pick their two values using Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead Value Assessment. Everyone shares their values in the meeting (including you, the leader) – explaining why they were picked. This amazing activity, gives a window into how each team member wants to “show up” every day. ➡Knowing your team member's values allows you to target your reward & recognition, identify how to best support them in times of stress, & target projects that will further strengthen or grow them. 👏 Next step is to start each team meeting with a quick peer to peer “shout out” – where team members can give kudos to each other for leaning into their values in a particular work interaction/client situation. ➡Continue to leverage your team canvas when communicating about your team's growth, in your cross-functional projects, & in your ongoing development opportunities. The Why: 💕 We all want to be understood, be seen, & belong. The team canvas & Brené Brown values exercises are great ways for leaders to better serve their teams & build a workplace where we can all flourish.

“Knock on wood” is something many people say so they don’t jinx themselves. As a kid, who had a Swedish Gramma, I grew up using this phrase to wake-up my family’s Tomte. A Tomte is a Swedish elf who lives in the wooden beams of your house & protects your family from misfortune. By knocking on wood, you’re alerting him & asking for help. Each year on the night of Dec 23 our family leaves out a bowl of porridge, as a sign of gratitude, thanking our Tomtes for watching over us & protecting us from harm over the last year. If you forget to leave porridge out for your Tomtes they will be mischievous & cause trouble for your family in the new year. This tradition & story has been handed down across generations of Swedes. It got me thinking about the importance of sharing stories or traditions in organizations, with both team members & customers. Just like the Tomte, traditions in organizations act as protectors, reminding teams of their purpose, aligning them around shared values, & helping them navigate challenges together. They create a sense of belonging: 💚how you document your culture (e.g. Zappos Culture Book) 💚how you recognize team members (e.g. Southwest’s Warrior Spirit) 💚how you tell your company's origin story (e.g. Sara Blakely & Spanx) And just like leaving porridge out for the Tomte, examine how you’re intentionally recognizing & rewarding your team - showing gratitude for how they deliver on your brand promises. If you’re not, you might experience much more than mischief – but instead customer churn. As we head into the new year, it’s worth reflecting on the traditions that define your organization. How are they shaping your culture, building connections, & fostering loyalty?

This weekend as we were decorating our home for the holidays, I noticed similarities to the fundamentals of many CX frameworks. 👫Culture: each box we unpacked brought stories of the items – my grandmother’s candlesticks, my husband’s apple ornament from 2nd grade, the boys’ baby handprints, etc. 🔸CX framework: when a new team member joins your organization what are the traditions, artifacts, & stories you share with them to help them understand your CX mission & the important role they play in it? 🗺Strategy: over the years we’ve accumulated several boxes of decorations, without some artistic direction, it’s no telling how our boys would have placed the items around the house. 🔸CX framework: most people in your organization are willing & able to deliver on the organization’s brand promises – but they may need some direction/a guidepost on what those ideal behaviors look like. Make sure you’re empowering your team with clear CX skills & ideal actions. 🎨Design: living in a historic home I try to use decorations that evoke a similar time period (bubble lights on the tree are my favorite). Knowing this about me, my friends & family gift me beautiful decorations that fit in the style of my home. 🔸CX framework: when team members identify a new CX improvement idea, do you ensure it aligns with your CX roadmap, CX vision, & brand promises before implementing it? 🔊Listening: feeling melancholy this weekend I wasn’t ready to start decorating, but after hearing our oldest son talk about how his favorite thing is seeing the mantel lights sparkle at night – I quickly got myself into the holiday spirit. 🔸CX framework: When your CX to do list gets daunting & you don’t have the energy to tackle it; take 30 min to immerse yourself in the comments/ voices from your customers, employees, & community. This will help humanize the tasks & give you renewed drive to build better experiences for all those you serve. 🤝Collaboration: if I had to decorate the house by myself, it would have taken forever – but because I had the help of my husband & boys, we accomplished it quickly. Not only that, but we were able to share holiday memories, envision new places for the decorations, & everyone felt a part of the final product. 🔸CX framework: we all know that CX is a team sport, how are you breaking down silos to ensure each department has their voice heard in the CX improvement process & empowering them to delight customers. Align your CX goals with the organizational goals to gather buy-in & ignite excitement in the teams. We’ve entered the final leg of the marathon – the yearend push: wrapping up projects, presents, & plans. Look at your CX framework before the new year & see which components require some holiday magic.

🥫 “Put a marble in the jar” – is a phrase my kids hope I say daily. Five years ago, we sat down as a family & using best practices I gained as a leader, we determined our family values. We talked about what was important to our family, how people would “know” our values through our behavior, & what attributes made our family unique. Each person listed values they thought were important, we voted to find consensus, & after a few sessions we settled on our family values: 👬 Kindness 💕 Love 🤝 Respect 👨👩👦👦 Family 🕊 Peace 🙏 Gratitude 👨🚒 Courage 😇 Truth 💪 Grit We wanted to find a way to acknowledge when a person authentically displayed our family values, so each night at the dinner table we go around & ask for a “marble moment”. If a person exhibited our family values that day they share their story & put one marble in the jar. 🥫 Once our marble jar is full, we celebrate by doing something together as a family (e.g. going to a museum, to the lake, out to eat, etc.). ↪ Switching gears to CX: 🔗How is your organization linking your company values/CX brand promises to your employee recognition program? 🙋♂️How are you operationalizing your company values into clear service standards of behavior, so your team knows what’s expected? 🏆How are you celebrating your employees who consistently embody your culture? 📑How are you including your organizational values in your hiring, promoting, & offboarding processes? 🥫 My challenge to you: Create opportunities for your employees to share their “marble moments” at your next team meeting.

Congratulations to the City of South Bend's Innovation & Technology team - led by Denise Linn Riedl - for winning 1st place Digital City for our population bracket! I have had a blast getting to know Denise & the rest of the City team over the last few months! They have assembled a great group of cross-department team members to come together to design an - open, informative, & user-friendly resident experience. The team has been hard at work: 💕 Defining the desired resident emotions 👨👩👧👦 Creating resident personas 🗺️ Building resident journey maps 🛠️ Outlining service blueprints I'm excited for all that's ahead for this great team & City! 🚀

“You are the dream of all of your ancestors.” – Bert Hellinger This quote rings especially true for me every year during the week of Thanksgiving. I look around our table & see not only the faces of my loved ones, but the china, silver, serving platters, gravy ladles, & jelly dishes from my paternal & maternal grandparents & great grandparents. During our meal, we: 🧡Recount the tales of our loved ones & their trips from their home countries of Croatia, Wales, Sweden, & Ireland. 💙Talk about how they settled across the Rust Belt & the hard jobs they had in the steel mills & farming the Minnesota prairie. 💚Marvel at what they did to make ends meet during the Depression & how my paternal Gramma always said “We were poor, but I never knew it as a kid. We always had everything we needed.” 💛Laugh about the goofy things my parents did to stretch a dollar raising me & my two brothers – sacrificing to prioritize our education & ensuring we would be the first generation to graduate from college. In the quiet moments of Thanksgiving morning, as I’m setting the table with Mina & Louis’ (my paternal great grandparents) beautiful Haviland China that my Gramma & her siblings bought them as an anniversary present right before the Crash of 1929, I think about how they would smile to see all the branches of their family tree today & I like to think that they would be proud of how we’re growing. 🌳 I’m grateful for the values and attributes of my ancestors and how that has informed and shaped my life. What dream are you living for your ancestors? pic: Gramma & me - Thanksgiving 1985 🦃

42% of consumers learn about minority owned businesses through word of mouth. (Dynata, 2021) The impact of customer experience is crucial to growing any business, but most importantly for new small businesses – as they establish their reputation in the market. I was so excited to share my passion for building a strong customer experience program with the South Bend Entrepreneurship & Adversity Program members! Thanks to Mike Morris & Sue McDonald for inviting me. I loved meeting all the entrepreneurs & hearing the remarkable experiences they’re already delivering to customers throughout the region! Throughout our 3-hour workshop, we developed: 👨👩👧👦Customer personas 🗺️Customer journey maps – highlighting the “moment of truth” 💕How they want customers to feel after interacting with them 📊Ways to measure customer feedback 🩹Service recovery methods – when things don’t go as planned 🌲Ways to scale your customer experience program as they grow Here’s to taking customer experiences to new heights! 🚀

Are you the water? 🌊 Or are you the sand? ⛱️ When life feels overwhelming, I know it’s time for a solo trip to Union Pier, MI; where the Lake has a way of bringing me clarity & peace. Last week, as I walked the shore, searching for beach glass, & watching the waves - I noticed how the strong, loud waves crashed on the sand again & again. In that moment I started challenging myself to rethink how I viewed the water & sand. I used to tell myself to “be like the water”, in how I live my life: 🔹Be strong 🔹Soften harden situations or people 🔹Take up space 🔹Be dependable But watching the waves hit the sand over & over made me pause. Perhaps, it’s better to be more like the sand?: 🔸Embrace what is & isn’t in my control 🔸Stay resilient, yet yielding 🔸Be more malleable, just as sand forms new shapes after each wave 🔸Release, adapt, & simply delight (like a sandcastle) After a full day at the Lake, I felt refreshed & ready to challenge myself to find ways I could be more like the sand in my daily life. Sometimes the answers lie not in crashing forward but in grounding ourselves where we are.

“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” -      Edward Everett Hale In honor of Lucy Stone & all those who fought for the right to vote - granted to women on August 26, 1920.