161: Steven Keith: I really didn’t know how to fix itSteven Keith Show Notes Page
Steven Keith was hired by a creative agency to build their digital consulting practice. As Steven began to build his team, he was hiring people and managing the team in a culturally different way than the legacy business. It wasn’t working. The CEO sat Steven down and told him he needed to fix it fast. Ultimately, Steven found success by getting the entire agency to focus on this one thing.
Steven was born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Along with his older sister Karen and young sister Julianna. His father was an ironworker that built skyscrapers and an executive assistant to the president of a large regional bank.
At an early age he could be found building dams and plugging up any creek he could find.
He is an indiscriminate learner soon to be graduating to amateur polymath—which all started at the University of Iowa’s radically-interdisciplinary guinea pig program in advanced liberal studies. At Iowa, Steven couldn’t commit to medicine, genetics, theology, philosophy or writing, despite several attempts, so he designed his own curriculum—within the realm of Epistemology (fancy word for theories of knowledge).
His first serious job out of college was a writing position at Morningstar, Inc. in Chicago where he bent the rules about writing for people interested in stocks and mutual funds. When the luster wore off, he grabbed the smartest technologist in the company to go spin-off a web software company called Gorilla. In his first year, in his own company (circa 1998), he was tasked with redefining the experience of brokers trading in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—to transform everything into digital. That’s the point where his career in customer experience transformation was born.
While building his company in Chicago, Steven studied corporate language and communications (Psycholinguistics) at Northwestern University and Enterprise Marketing Strategy at the University of Chicago.
Today, Steven is the founder of CX Pilots where he works with companies in the Fortune 10 as well as the Fortune 10,000 by helping them transform their strategies and operations to become more systematically empathetic to their internal and external customers. Over the past year, he has begun to tighten his focus on the “client experience” (as opposed to the customer experience) for the CPA, Legal, Architecture/Engineering, Investment Banking and Insurance industries, where the relationship is the product. His super power is helping executives see CX through the lens of economics, organizational development, and innovation management.
Steven lives in Raleigh, NC. When he’s not traveling to advise and support his clients he is either googling Calculus problems to help his creative high school junior Oliver pass classes that don’t excite him in the least, or sending money to East Carolina University’s Engineer School in support of his oldest son’s Simon STEM habit.
Tweetable Quotes and Mentions
Listen to @stevenkeith to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet
“The difference really is in partnership economics.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“The problems we’ve had with Customer Experience is that it’s a scope and scale game.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“We’re trying to scale empathy and make relationships as meaningful as we possibly can.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“How can you demonstrate that you provide value that is above and beyond?” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“It’s not only what your adding but how your adding value.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“How well are you illustrating or amplifying your values?” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“What are you doing on the economic side to work on your interpersonal relationship balance sheet?” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“Service fits inside experience.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“Everything that’s wrong about business that I’ve approached is a people thing.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“Allow your possibilities to blossom.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
“Allow your passion to align with your work.” -Steven Keith Click to Tweet
Hump to Get Over
Steven Keith was hired by a creative agency to build their digital consulting practice. As Steven began to build his team, he was hiring people and managing the team in a culturally different way than the legacy business. It wasn’t working. The CEO sat Steven down and told him he needed to fix it fast. Ultimately, Steven found success by getting the entire agency to focus on this one thing.
Advice for others
Develop the skills to communicate visually.
Holding him back from being an even better leader
Time, trust and the risk tolerance of others.
Best Leadership Advice
Stop being so professionally promiscuous.
Secret to Success
I’m a deeply empathetic systems thinker.
Best tools that helps in Business or Life
Dealing with autism.
Recommended Reading
Contacting Steven Keith
website: http://www.cxpilots.com
email: steven [at] cxpilots.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevenkeith
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenkeith/
Resources and Show Mentions
54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.
Show Transcript:
[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]
161: Steven Keith: I really didn’t know how to fix it
Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.
The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more.
Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader Legion, today I’m excited because we have somebody who’s going to share with us some insights about the power of relationships in the customer experience. Steven Keith was born in Cedar Rapid, Iowa along with her older sister Karen and younger sister Juliana. His father was an iron worker that builds skyscrapers and his mother was an executive assistant to the president of a large regional bank. At an early age he could be found building dams and plugging up any creek he could find. He is an indiscriminate learner soon to be graduating to amateur polymath. Which all started at the University of Iowa’s radically interdisciplinary guinea pig program in advance liberal studies. At Iowa Steven couldn’t commit to medicine, genetics, theology, philosophy or writing despite several attempts so he design his own curriculum within the realm of Epistemology, a fancy word for theories of knowledge.
His first serious job out of college was writing position at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago where he bent the rules about writing for people interested in stocks and mutual funds. When the luster wore off he grab the smartest technologist in the company to go spin-off a web software company called Gorilla. In his first year, in his own company which is around 1998, he was task with redefining the experience of brokers trading in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and to transform everything into digital. That’s the point where his career in customer experience transformation was born.
While building his company in Chicago, Steven studied corporate language and communications at Northwestern University and Enterprise Marketing Strategy at the University of Chicago. Today, Steven is the founder of CX Pilots where he works with companies in the Fortune 10 as well as the Fortune 10.000 helping them transform their strategies and operations to become more systematically, empathetic to their internal and external customers.
Over the past year he’s begun to tighten his focus on the client experience as opposed to the customer experience where the CPA, Legal, Architecture, Engineering, Investment Banking and insurance industries where the relationships is the product. His super power is helping executive see CX through the lens of economics, organizational development and innovation management. Steven currently lives in Riley, North Carolina and when he’s not travelling to advice and support his clients, he’s either Googling Calculus problems to help his creative, high school junior, Oliver pass Calculus classes that didn’t excite him in the least. Or sending money to East Carolina University of Engineering School to support his oldest son Simon STEM habit. Steven Keith, are you ready to help us get over the hump?
Steven Keith: I sure am Jim.
Jim Rembach: I’m glad you’re here. I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?
Steven Keith: Yeah. The current passion as you mentioned Jim was the client experience. So I spend a lot of the early part of my career focus on customer experience learning what that meant and how it can be applied. Then for some odd reasons I started getting calls, inquiries from people in big legal firms, CPA firms who wanted to focus on building better client relationships. They wanted to apply the tenets of CX but they wanted to deal with to win, keep, develop, and nurture better client relationships. So, I’m very passionate about that, it’s very visceral and real instead of selling more products removing friction that prevents a lot of people from buying something, we’re talking relationships.
Jim Rembach: So it’s interesting that you say that. For me, I’m like, okay—it’s becoming words all about relationship and so whether it’s B2B. B2C, even government for that matter. Going to some nonprofit organizations that the relationships is really a foundational component. Help me understand how it really differs when you start talking about those client type organizations versus some of those others?
Steven Keith: The difference really is in partnership economics and that’s kind of a term that our team has come up with. When you’re dealing with a relationship that means millions of dollars, volume doesn’t really apply in the equation. The problems that we’ve had traditionally with CX is it’s a scope and scale game. We’re trying to scale empathy and make those relations as meaningful as we possibly can. It’s usually so that we can increase customer lifetime value from $460 to $750. Client experience these are oftentimes a figure relationships and there is really no volume we might be dealing with the customers set of 20. The economics of building those partnerships and nurturing them so that they remain as valuable as possibly can inside the firm, it’s just a little bit in the approach.
Jim Rembach: That makes sense and I appreciate your clarifying that for me. Some of the things that started running through my head is—I started thinking about, hey, we’re just having meetings on the golf course building relationships or somewhere else so that we can have that non business type of connection and discussion and really get down to who people are not so much they do. But then I also my mind started running around that I would that in these types of environment you run a couple of risk. One risk being that one particular customer client is a large portion of my business and if they go we’re wiped out. So, what does that cause people to do different? And then the other thing is a risk associated with missing out on opportunities because you can invest in a relationship component. I can imagine, what kind of quandary are people dealing with in that environment that others may not besides the whole smaller client based scenario?
Steven Keith: Let’s just talk about two lever that are happening and let’s just stick to one example. In the law firm what’s happening is a lot of large corporations, just think about the Fortune 50, they all have relationships with legal firms but they also have large internal legal frameworks some of my clients we’re dealing with they’re having a holy cow moment, my client is starting to insource much more of their legal and we’re losing tremendous opportunity so what leverage do we have? What do we have within our control where we can increase the value that we provide to prevent these huge corporate clients from insourcing a bulk of their legal? So, it really comes down to everything—strip the commodity out of the proposition. What it comes down to the relationship, the partnership of how can you deliver value, how can you demonstrate that you offer value that goes above and beyond what an insourced legal proposition withhold. It boils down to the experience that they have with you. What are the things that you’re doing specifically to add more value to that partnership? And how are you doing it? It’s not only what you’re adding but how you’re adding it. What we try to do is deconstruct those partnerships and re-engineer the process through which you can offer a better overall experience to that corporate client, that’s just one example. The same things happening in the CPA, accounting, consulting, a lot of these things are changing and what we’re trying to do is bolster these people who hold these key client relationships so that they’re not in danger of losing them.
Jim Rembach: To me it sounds like a lot of your work is on the client retention side and so when I start thinking about the whole client retention side I’m starting to think about how does an organization flip it in order to do new business. Let me give you a little bit of background, my wife has actually been in this client service business as a CPA and tax accountant for as long as we’ve been married. Some of the stories without talking about the guilty or the clients, they just talk about how they just try to manipulate, and they’re not interested in building relationships it’s like, give me, give me, give me. Sometimes people that don’t have the power—her she can’t really influence people to say, we shouldn’t be chasing that that’s bad business there’s no relationship there to be found they do treat us like a commodity. And it’s like, what are you going to do for me? And it’s always that way. So, sometimes they get those customers and it’s just a total drain on resources. So how much are you—working with clients on that whole client acquisition side?
Steven Keith: That’s where differ. You’re exactly right. It’s happening within the realm of our clients is that they come to us with a retention challenge it explicitly stated as, hey CX pilots we understand you’re focus on this we have retention problem. So we enter as retention experts but we leave as acquisition experts. What I mean by that is we help—remember earlier in our conversation I use the term partnership economics?
Jim Rembach: Yes.
Steven Keith: Partnership economics is a way for these client centered organization—CPA like your wife’s firm, to calibrate the retention and acquisition side of things. The problem that oftentimes by CPA firms is they’re not thinking in terms of acquisition. They have relationships with clients that treat them as commodities and, a lot of times because I haven’t done a very good job of using content to illustrate the value that they can provide. So what happens as a result is they are subject to what they put out into the universe. If you act like every other CPA firm and you’re not doing anything in terms of differentiating yourself or doing a good job really animating firm as no sense humans interested in doing really amazing work and you’re just really diligently sticking to knitting there’s no reason for a client to treat you other than just a commodity vendor. We try to switch that around and when I say calibrating the retention and acquisition side it’s all about how can we tell a better story? How can we really amplify the unique differentiated viewpoints we have on client relationships? And that’s a content game. What we’re doing differently is trying to figure out how do we help people tell a story and how do we liberate the human side of these client relationships.
Jim Rembach: Okay, as part of that I’m also thinking that you would possibly advise them to say, if you have a potential client who’s not even interested and you going down that path and sharing that then you shouldn’t be pursuing it because it’s kind of like a disqualifier because you’re not going to be able to make that connection. Is that right or wrong?
Steven Keith: That’s right. A really cool way of looking at this, I was working on this problem earlier this week, as a matter of fact. One of the things that we did was we brought up an architecture firms their enduring values. In one breath we’re saying we have this really great powerful values and everybody in here inside of her culture really lives this values, it’s palpable a really important part of this thriving culture. But in the next breath we heard, working with all this these clients is a drag because they don’t share values. And so it comes down to how well are you illustrated or amplifying your values? And what work are you doing on the economic side work on your interpersonal relationships balance sheet, if you will? Are you looking at clients that share your values? Are there any energies going in to the acquisition side? Were you trying to attract clients that actually share those values? The answer is typically no, how do you do that? That’s a big unsolved mystery for a lot of these firms. It’s what compromises a bulk of what’s interesting in the work that we do.
Jim Rembach: Okay. Someone who is certified in emotional intelligence and listening to you talk it’s like you’re trying to raise the level of emotion intelligence in the entire organization and then you’re trying to find other emotionally intelligent organizations to be your clients.
Steven Keith: Yup. So cool exercise when we do this workshop with this client based firms we start to workshop with—when people are doing their introductions we ask, what do you believe your customer or client IQ is on the scale of 1 to 10, just generically? They go around the table they say, they have seven I don’t know me probably a four and so on. Then we say, what do you think your customer EQ is? And so it generally starts out with, what does that mean? It means this. And people will say, woo, woo, I’m pretty high I’m probably eight. And then we would go around the table and I tabulate this things. And then at the end of the workshop, after we’ve gone through this deep empathy problems and we’ve workshop the crap out of this stuff we go back and say, Okay, so your IQ is 8 and your EQ is 9 how do you feel now at every single time that we do this after 9 hours of grueling work trying to iron out the empathy problems we generally see a 3 to 5 point drop in how people self-evaluate in terms of their IQ and EQ. And what’s interesting is people don’t think in terms of EQ people will generically say, I’m familiar with what my customers or my client’s needs are that’s the extent of their curiosity about their clients.
Jim Rembach: I think that the whole self-reporting piece is something that you really don’t have a whole lot of basis or knowledge in is extremely difficult.
Steven Keith: People do self-inflate and one of the reason why we do the pre-workshop inquiry, say, what you believe your EQ or IQ is and then we ask again at the end of the session is we want people to realize that all—for 20 years some of our clients have been doing what they consider to be client service and now we’re coming in and we’re talking about client experience they’re two totally separate things. What’s really interesting and really valuable is to sit in the room and watch your client have that epiphany like, Oh, man, all these years we’ve been comparing service with experience, we can’t do that anymore. Service fits inside of experience so this whole new realm of manufacturing empathy that we need to get better at as an entire company. Part of what we do is we want people to arrive at that aha moment on their own just by asking them the right questions and asking them understand the system in which client experience happens.
Jim Rembach: I think it’s a really important insight is that you have to create an environment by which people do their own self-discovery. Also knowing that some will never discover, however, that’s the way you have to do it. You can’t just tell them they have to come to that conclusion. When we start talking about all this, client experience, customer experience, self-reflection and actualization, all those things are loaded with emotions. One of the things that we like to talk about on the show are quotes because they bring out a lot of that emotion and energy sometimes. Is there a quote or two that you can share that you like?
Steven Keith: Yeah. There’s one quote—I have a lot of quotes like every one I’m sure I love them I collect them. But there’s one that keeps coming back to me and every time I find myself talking to an executive he or she may be laying out, like, here’s the problem that we’re having this how I think you can help us. This same quote keeps popping in to my head and it’s kind of an (19:32 inaudible) quote, it’s from the brother of one of my favorite cartoonist, Charles Crumb, “How perfectly god dammed delightful it is to be sure.” It was such a simple, innocent quote and when you think about it it’s absolutely pack full of—it’s charged with so much. The meaning I take from this is about confidence. The sheer willingness it takes to move things forward it’s a double edged sword too. In my experience too often leaders need to be sure it need to be certain in order to move forward. And how likely is it that they’re truly sure? Not too often from my experience. The other side of sword is, what does it take to jump in the absence of being sure? What is it that what you do when you’re not absolutely positive about something. Everything that is wrong in business that I’ve ever approached it’s a people thing, it’s an emotional thing, it’s a leadership thing and it’s all and how well-meaning—when you take people to have all the best intentions how are they managing decisions? How are they managing decisions in the absence of feeling sure about something? I find that endlessly captivating.
Jim Rembach: I think you just said a really important point and it goes back to that whole thing about understanding your EQ and being able to use it in order to be able to drive your professional performance as well as your personal performance. How do you become sure enough so that you do move forward knowing that you need to maintain some humility and knowing that you need to be adaptive of things don’t go the way you plan or if you got a new piece of information all of those leads to being more emotionally intelligent. I know—we’re talking about your background going from building dams to building client experiences there’s whole lot of humps in between. Is there a time where you’ve had to get over the hump that you can share?
Steven Keith: I’m not sure what joke the great cosmic manager in the sky has been playing on me but I’ve spent most of my career managing people, creative people, and I’ve grown many creative teams who’s mission was is to manufacture highly subjective and creative intellectual property—creative agency and so on. I’m probably one of the least conventional managers on the planet and I’ll just go ahead and admit that normal people have always hated reporting to me until they don’t. There’s one situation where I was brought in to a big creative agency to design and develop their digital and consulting practice. I was reporting directly to the CEO, he was a super conventional CEO and he’s one of those guys—the North Carolina’s governors call when they run out of ideas—he brought me in to build his agency’s new seven and eight figures strings of revenue and develop a digital practice.
So, I’m building this team inside of this creative agency and in order to do that successfully I need to go out and find an onboard, and enculturate not only people with new skills but people that—all the agency employees that were there before me are going to get along with them. I was a person who is collecting gifted and talented people and pulling them in from all over nation and bringing them into this little conventional macrocosm and I had to figure out how to make this all work. The hump here is—so I have this very rigid CEO who wanted revenue from digital and I had all of these people that I needed to bring in to make it all work, who can you make that happen? Well, if you’re me you open source your leadership and management. In other words, you get this people to sort of manage themselves. Did it work? Nope, it didn’t. So, there I was baking this really delicate soufflé of a team, very complicated recipe and I was alienating all the existing teams adjacent to our new digital team. I was trying to building this futuristic leadership model within a highly traditional hierarchical environment and it wasn’t work. So, I had the CEO sit me down and say, hey, this sucks this isn’t working you need to fix something fast. And so, that was a huge problem and probably one of the most complex things in my career and I really didn’t know how to fix it right off the bat. It took a lot of introspective thinking and it was just a tremendous challenge.
Jim Rembach: How were you able to make the shift to where things didn’t come out for the better?
Steven Keith: What I did essentially was I figured out that in order for me to be successful I needed to make this firm successful. The epiphany that I had was I had to get the whole agency to start organizing more around the customer. It was the most obvious move. The complications were really that I was trying to develop a highly empathetic practice inside of a highly inside out organization. They were organized to deliver PR and advertising and creative as efficiently as possible and keep as many people as billable as possible. So, customer experience doesn’t really on the table until we brought that at the center.
I was trying to throw as much of that inside out thinking out the door and lead from the outside in which went entirely against the grain of the organization. What happen is one of our clients at that time which was the, I guess it still is the largest health care insurance company in the State, came to us and said that they wanted us to architect a digital transformation and I was in charge of trying to make that happen. So I use that transformation as the proof that customer centricity or outside in thinking was the best approach and then so doing I wanted to illustrate to my own firm that, hey, they’re paying us enormous amount of money to make this happen and it works and this is how we’re going to structure it we should be eating our own dog food we should be doing this ourselves. And that helps us get over that humps. People started to see like, hey there’s a lot of validity to doing this instead of focusing on efficiency and billability keeping all of our people as valuable as possible we ought to be thinking about how do we make our client a lot more successful, how do we make our customer thrive?
Jim Rembach: It sounded to me like you did the same thing that you were talking about a moment ago where you had them come to that self-realization that, hey, instead of you trying to drive it, it was them absorbing it and coming to their own conclusion.
Steven Keith: That’s exactly right. And I love to take credit for that being like a well-defined and pre-designed strategy but it was almost an accident. It took me a while to figure out like, holy crap, this is exactly how we’re going to do it. Again, the great cosmic manager in the sky sort of drop it off in my lap and it took me a minute or two to figure out like, aaah, so this is how we’re going to do it.
Jim Rembach: Okay, so I know you’ve got a lot of things going on, you open up a couple other offices, you’re doing some travelling, you talk about all the client work and trying to really niche down on this client centric and client experience piece, but when you start looking at all these things you have going on, what’s one of your goals?
Steven Keith: My central goal right now is Ikigai it’s a Japanese word for the process of allowing your possibilities to blossom. So, Ikigai is really all about just aligning you passion with your work. Specifically, how do you take your life’s Venn, the Venn diagram, and then consciously and deliberately make all of those circles more concentric. My goal is to figure out what do I truly love? What does the world need? What can I get paid for? What am I good at? And then make all those things—take them out of a Venn state and move them into a concentric state.
Jim Rembach: The Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.
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Jim Rembach: Alright here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Steven, the hump day hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us a robust get rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Steven Keith, are you ready to hoedown?
Steven Keith: I certainly am Jim.
Jim Rembach: Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?
Steven Keith: Time, trust and risk tolerance of others.
Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?
Steven Keith: Stop being so professionally promiscuous.
Jim Rembach: What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?
Steven Keith: I’m a deeply empathetic system’s thinker. I think in terms of systems.
Jim Rembach: What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?
Steven Keith: I don’t know how to do this quickly. Dealing with autism.
Jim Rembach: What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners and it can be from any genre?
Steven Keith: It’s definitely, The Art of Looking Sideways by Ellen Fletcher.
Jim Rembach: Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to www.fastleader.net/stevenkeith. Okay, Steven, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25 and you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So, what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?
Steven Keith: Visual thinking. I think we’re all highly fluent in our native language to the extent that we can verbally articulate the things we want to say but if your job has anything to do with complexity and you need to help other people visualize alternate realities in the business context you have to be able to map things where words in your native tongue have limits. So being able to visually think through things or do what we call cognitive cartography, mapping out complex ideas, you’re developing that fluency is definitely something I want to focus on early in my career.
Jim Rembach: Steven it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you?
Steven Keith: www.cxpilots.com is a good one, I’d say @stevenkeith on Twitter or steven@cxpilots.com.
Jim Rembach: Steven Keith, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!
Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.
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