S1E5 - Experience – The Feel of Work (And Why It Fuels Results)

People don’t work for companies – they work for experiences. In this episode of Leadership Matters, Glenn Price and Terry Reynolds explore why execution lives or dies on how it feels to work in your organisation, not just on the quality of your strategy deck.

They unpack the tight link between leader behaviour, employee experience and customer experience, why “talent magnets” feel different the moment you walk in, and how purpose, autonomy and everyday leadership moments shape whether people give you compliance… or commitment. You’ll hear practical ideas for auditing your own leadership shadow, engineering moments that matter, and tuning into the energy in the room – not just the engagement survey scores.

If your culture talks customer first but treats employee experience as an afterthought, this episode will sting (in a good way).

Transcript

Welcome to Leadership Matters. My name is Glenn Price and I'm joined by my business partner, Terry Reynolds. And this is a podcast series created by LeaderShape Consulting to help leaders take their vision and deliver results. And before we start on this particular episode, all around Experience, I just wanted to create some signposts, guess, in terms of the journey that we've been on so far. So in our previous three podcasts, we've talked about that first big step of four, which is called Set Direction.

And set direction has three specific drivers in it. The first is vision. Once you've got an inspiring vision, the next is strategy. How do you get there? A plan that adds value. And then last of all alignment. How do you make sure that not only your leaders, but the entire organisation is aligned to the strategy to get to the vision and all three of those components we defined and when we did the research and in the book, it explores that these are rational components. And the reason why I'm signposting this before we dive into this particular podcast, is now we take a second step. So the second step we call engage and excite. And this has three drivers that specifically are more the emotional side, that balance between rational, emotional that we talked about in the introduction. And the first of those three drivers we call experience. And in the Vision to Results book, we say the line, people don't work for companies, they work for experiences. And I think for years and definitely our experience when we sold our business across to TTAC is that we learned that customers obsess over the customer experience. It's reported on, it's discussed, yet we completely overlook the employee experience that produces it. Yeah, look, I think this is a really, really interesting step because it's one of those ones that is often neglected. Customer experience really is a mirror of employee experience. You can't have one without the other if you like.

And I think that, you know, it's very, very difficult for organisations to deliver, you know, care for people, warmth, know, excellence to customers if the internal experience of their people is quite cold and, you know, I guess, fragmented and unexpiring. It's not a great place to work. It's not a great place to work. It feels a little bit like this friction or the sandpaper there, right? I mean, we want great places to work, but this is almost more powerful than this. is this is where we're focusing on execution. And my belief, Terry, is that execution lives or dies by, as you said, how it feels at work and what it feels like to be around the people at work and the work that you're doing. And what freaks me out about that is that when we were doing the research, we saw it time and time again. People don't give their best when they're in bad experiences or poor experiences. What they'll give you is compliance. And that's a that's a whole different topic to discuss.

That love of the…you know, when you get good customer experience… …and, you know, to be honest, it's a few and far between in regards to organisations. know, particularly in Australia you don't walk in every place and go, wow, that was a great experience. But you do remember the good ones. The people just seem so into their brand. You know, you and I have only recently had an example of this… …with a client we were working with and went into one of their stores.

Amazing experience. The guy just lived the brand. He was so into it. We walked out warm with, you know, handfuls of stuff we had bought. But we could tell that he was just so engaged in that particular brand. And that came across with the way that he talked to us. Well, there's that formula, isn't it? I think Sears was the first one to do a study that can actually put some percentages around this. But if we want to have a great customer experience, and my belief is that customers that come, whether it be store or whether it be an internal customer often, is that they're comparing you against the best customer experience they've ever had without telling you what that is. So we don't find that retail stores, compare another against another retail store, you could be comparing against a flight that you took or, or changing your health insurance or how you looked after by a bank. It's, it's sitting in your head going, that's my level of great customer experience.

What we do know, back to that individual in the store, is that great customer experience are driven by employee experience and employee experience is driven by leader experience or leadership behavior. And so my question to you is, what does a leader's everyday behavior say about the experience of working in their organisation? Tells us a lot, doesn't it? You know, sometimes the experience that you have is a sales tool for people walking out going, love to work for that organisation. It tells you a lot about what the culture is like, how well people are treated. It all comes up through the way that they interact with you in wherever you actually are, wherever you have that experience. It's interesting that you say that, you know, it's quite infectious, right? And I think quite incestuous at times that you know what the culture's like. 

People now go on to Glassdoor. They're able to talk to people and reach out to people on social media that have worked at that organization before. So it gives a little bit of a window as to the emotional environment of the work, right? Am I going to fit in there is one, but am I going to thrive inside that? And I often think that organisations are either, we say they're either talent magnifiers, meaning they develop people really well and that shows up in their career pathway and success, or they're talent attractors. Right. So the culture and experience that's been created by the leadership team is attracting the right sorts of talent. A grade basketball players like playing with a grade basketball. Lifts you game doesn't it? Can you demand excellence while you're creating that positive empowering experience or does tension always come with the territory? Because part of that experience is going, this is what we expect here. Right. There's a balance between this is a great place to work and

We have high performance standards. Look, I think you can… If it's a great place to work, you almost have a right to demand high performance. You know, and that is that the external environment has been set for you to give your best. We've all worked in places where we want to do well but the environment doesn't support that. You know, it could be stepping outside of the cultural norm or whatever it is.
You know, I just wonder, you know, does pay have something to do with that? And I think people, some people, not all, but some people will stay for a while for pay. But other people will stay in organizations because of how that makes them feel. And, you know, as what is it, drive, the book drive, he talks a lot about going, you know, take pay off the table, pay people enough to take it off the table, et cetera. So they're not focused on it. It's more to do with the experience of being inside that organisation that goes, you know what?

Maybe I'm not paid as high as I could be, but I'm OK here because I'm surrounded by, I'm getting supported by the leadership team. They're giving me autonomy and the things that I'm looking for probably drive that performance. That's really powerful what you said because I'm all of these components that you're discussing back to the leadership behaviour. And I'm not necessarily saying the leadership team now. I think the experience is created by your first level leader, whatever they...

demonstrate themselves or whatever they ignore or whatever they emphasize. And you're right, in Drive by Dan Pink, he talks about that importance of autonomy that you've touched on. He also talks about the importance of purpose. Now, purpose links back to podcast one where we talked about vision. It's a component of vision. And so how do you create these great experiences? Put pay to one side, put building space and environment to one side, put technology to one side.

And maybe that area of giving people a purpose and then getting out of their way and allowing them to produce great work, i.e. autonomy, is the experience that we're looking for. When we talk and we measure customer experience and we do journey maps or we do in-store flow and all of those sorts of things, an exercise I love to ask is, what do you expect when I'm talking with a real customer? What do you expect from this experience? And they often say things like, I want it personalised, I want to feel like the person's talking directly to me, that it's private. I want it to be seamless and frictionless. I want the service to be there when I need it, but not all the time, right? So you're not bugged by it. And I can't help but think that the employee experience, going back to that gentleman in that store, I wonder how his leader has given him the same components. Did his leader make his leadership behaviour and development personalised? Did he feel like he was the only one in the room? Was the person genuinely interested in their career path? Were they there when needed but not all the time? Right? Because you're right, experience is definitely a retention tool. And what makes top performers stay, as Dan says in his book, not normally the pay and the perks. That has to be there as a hygiene factor. But it's how work feels.

Why do you think senior teams just keep missing that? Because this is an area where when we did the research, they're skipping the experience step completely. Yeah. They... When you come back to the model, I think that people, and I am generalising when I say this, that it's easy to focus on those rational components. What we're talking about here is all of a sudden this emotional component. And I think that most leaders, many, many leaders, have more to do with we've got a strategy, we've got a vision, let's execute on that, as opposed to the… …what some people might consider to be more the fluffy stuff and find out about how people feel. You know, employees, you know, organisations I should say, you know, often will do… …will do an employee engagement survey. And that'll give us an idea or some feedback about how happy people are in the service. But we all know about the faults of employee surveys or engagement surveys that sometimes don't really tell us really what's under the hood and what's really going on. I think it's very much a personalised thing for the execs, for the leaders to get down and talk to people, being involved, be engaging with them, be on hand, help them, guide them, all of those types of things. It takes time.

What does that take you away from doing? And I think that, you know, people, leaders will just weigh up the option of going, actually, it's just easier to execute than it is to get involved with the side of people. Well, that two things come to mind. The first is the three hats that we all wear, right? The leadership hat, the management hat and the coaching hat. And it would seem to me as if we over index the manager hat and if we haven't been able to push down the work, then we don't have time to do the leadership piece or the development piece in coaching. The second thing that comes to mind is that if the leader is uncomfortable in more of the emotional component, right, which I totally understand. I think that's probably human. It's probably natural. But I believe that there's a direct connection between the leader's mood and their presence, their gravitas, their connection themselves. And I think that directly shapes the experience that other people have. 

We've all sat on a floor the boss hops out of the lift and all of a sudden there's a tenseness that comes in. Or there's almost a beat of momentum that starts because the leader is on the floor and she or he or they are going to be able to connect with us. And that's seen as quite a powerful thing as opposed to, my God, head down, headphones on, where do we need to go? Do you think most leaders even know the vibe that they're creating when they reach out? I think there's definitely I've seen and worked with some that do. But they're probably few and far between. I think the majority of them don't really appreciate or understand the impact that their mood, the way they come across impacts others. But you'll also get team members that just put their head down and go, you know what, I'm just not going to engage with that. I'm just going to keep on going. I've got my own things to do. I'm not going to allow that to impact the way that I am. you know, there is definitely you know, twos and fros around, know, some leaders are aware, some are not aware. Look, the reason why this is the fourth step in the driver's model is that it's so important to almost curate like a designer, deliberately curate these moments, not only for customers, but also to understand that link between employees and customers. And you can't just be chasing one in your strategy. You need to understand that when you execute on that strategy, it's going to impact both employee experience and customer experience.

So here are some top tips for leaders on how to design great experiences. Number one, audit your shadow, right? Like constantly be asking, what's it like to be on the end or the receiving end of me? The answer will teach you more than any engagement survey, like you said before.

Number two, engineer moments that matter. And that's hard because different people, different strokes, different parts of the organisation, but identify the key touch points in the employee's journey. whether it's onboarding, feedback, recognition, reboarding, you often talk about and elevate those moments deliberately and their leadership exposure moments where you're able to reach down and connect. And talking about connect.

Number three, connect experience to results. So I think when we did the original research, Terry, we saw this visible line between how people feel and what the business achieves. It's just there. And so often it's not said, it's just felt. We need to make sure that that's more overtly brought up in the strategy narrative and when we're celebrating progress like we talked about in the strategy podcast. 

And last of all, think listen for energy, not just opinion. You know, we believe pulse checks and engagement scores miss the nuance that's actually happening in the experience. And so we need to pay attention to tone and to body language and to silence in the room and become really attuned and help leaders have the tools

for them to be really connecting in to the bit that's not said, but the bit that people feel, right? So we always end with a provocation. Today's one is if your people rated the daily experience of working with you out of 10, what score would you earn? What would you like it to be? What are you going to do differently tomorrow to try and move that score?