2020-02-01_strategy+business

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personalized development goals over the next few weeks. These goals were all

tailored to each individual’s level of experience, maturity, and concerns. No

one, including the CEO, was exempt. It was understood that as their leadership

capabilities grew, the leadership experience work would broaden. First, they

had to figure out what kinds of new habits to instill — what, for example,

does customer-centric behavior actually look like? — and then model those

habits themselves.

Over the next six months, the formal leaders took on three tasks. First,

through short surveys (for breadth) and interviews (for depth), they gained

a clearer idea of what their employees were thinking and how they might

contribute. They concentrated on the “frozen middle”: the people at the middle

levels of the hierarchy who had not embraced the changes facing the enterprise

(see “Thawing the frozen middle,” by Carol Stubbings, Darren Homer, and John

Francis, page 36). Second, they started looking at customer data with fresh eyes,

bringing in employees to help figure out what their end-users were missing and

how it might affect the company’s strategy. Third, they gently but persistently

explored some of their conflicts with other formal leaders that had led to painful

setbacks in the past. They became more aware of the paradoxes inherent in

senior roles: For example, the higher one rose in the hierarchy, the easier it was to

become isolated, until one’s skills in long-range leadership atrophied.

The details might vary from one company to the next, but sessions and

assignments like these are concrete examples of improving leadership experience.

LX encompasses the individual and collective personal growth opportunities for

formal leaders of an enterprise, linked to their roles as influencers and catalysts

of EX and CX. An LX initiative might start with just the top 20 or 50 people,

but could ultimately extend to more than 10 percent of the staff, including the

frontline leaders of customer-facing employee teams. Inevitably, LX overlaps with

senior executives’ regular work, such as strategic conversations on difficult issues

(for example, crises that could affect the company’s reputation), and experiential

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