From Customer Experience to Employee Success
For the last decade and a half, I’ve witnessed, first hand, an amazing transformation in business. As the world became hyper-connected and the voice of a single customer could bring an entire brand to its knees, I watched company after company start doing what they said they were already doing: Putting the Customer First. I saw the shift from a siloed and centralized ‘brand loyalty’ concept to making the Customer Experience everybody’s focus. To be fair, a few visionary companies understood from the get-go that this was the path to success. Still, most of them did it because they needed to satisfy this new generation of empowered customers that had an entirely different set of expectations for products, services, and the companies behind them.
What’s curious is that these clients, customers, and users who fueled this revolution became the team members and leaders of today’s organizations. And just as we expect something different as consumers, it only makes sense that our thinking regarding our work and career shifts as well. We seek personal fulfillment, strive for improvement, and the role our work plays in our life has gone from the thing we are to the thing we do. The younger generations that increasingly make up today’s workforce are more purpose-driven and impact-seekers than any prior generations. They don’t see the relationship with their employers as a long term marriage, but as a mutually beneficial relationship, as an “alliance” even, as Reid Hoffman proposes.
This tectonic shift in the workforce has already happened. We now need to catch up to it. The success of a company will be predicated on the success of its employees, and a successful employee is one that can get a step closer to their objectives in life. Not just at work, not only this quarter. In life.
This new paradigm demands a new kind of leadership. One that goes from master-of-the-craft to Team Coach. From focusing on what to articulating why. From task delegators to team builders. In this brave new world, being good at what we do will only be the starting point for becoming a great leader. We must embrace the fact that to deliver results, we need to articulate purpose, draw the right talent to our teams, and ensure they stay around long enough to get the job done. And believe me, as frightening as embracing this change may sound, the alternative is even more terrifying.
This is why we started Blueprint.
We believe the answer to this challenge lies in taking a bold new look at not only what it means to lead but also at the tools needed to do so. Because the systems we are using today stem from a different paradigm. They are built with compliance in mind, for centralized functions in charge of “resources” and are entirely disjointed from the work we do every day. That’s how we end up using payroll systems to run performance reviews and wonder why everybody hates it. Or why the plethora of goals and objectives software out there feel like a coach that screams at the scoreboard more than one that focuses on coaching the team.
We started Blueprint because we need a new breed of tools with a fresh point of view. One of the leaders who make Employee Success their winning strategy and one of the individuals who feel empowered to take responsibility for their careers. Much like with Customer Experience, we need to bring tools and data to where the action is happening.
As part of this new workforce, we want to be an active part of an engaged community that helps define what this means for leaders, individuals, and companies.
As a software company, we are building the underlying technology pieces that will help great leaders scale, and good ones become better. So they can create great cultures, assemble amazing teams and deliver outstanding results.
We are working with:
- Leaders who already feel like their swimming upstream. Who are fighting current tools. Who are forced to lead from spreadsheets and slide decks.
- Individuals who are ready to take accountability for their next step and redefine success at work.
- Thought leaders, researchers, and authors who struggle from the sidelines not being able to see their contributions spread widely and systematically.
We are honored to be working with our first customers, and we are adding new pioneers to our platform. If you want to be part of the Employee Success revolution, drop us a line, we’d love to bring you along for the ride!
