Today’s interview is with Minter Dial, an international speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialized in leadership, branding and transformation. Minter joins me today to talk about his new book: You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader, what he has learned about leadership over the course of his career, what comes first…employee or customer experience and what the biggest asset in leadership is.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – When it comes to CX is your company a starter, riser or champion? – Interview with Adrian McDermott of Zendesk – and is number 371 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Minter:

• My podcast has been going for 10 years now! So, has Minter’s.
• Podcasting makes us smarter.
• If you know how to lead your life, you are gonna have a better chance of leading a business.
• If you have done something wrong or have made a mistake….. rather than seeking forgiveness go and earn the forgiveness. Do something that that changes people’s perception of you.
• Your role as a leader is to create employees that fundamentally believe in what you’re doing.
• Your role is to make everyone from the janitor up to the senior vice president of whatever aware of and to recognise their contribution, feel heard and feel that they are contributing.
• And, that is what’s going to drive discretionary effort.
• You are the leader of you.
• That starts with the leader themselves and especially how they manage their time., their self-care and continuous learning.
• Leaders need to become a master of their own time, not the victim of their own time.
• The new and emerging workplace will be a hybrid type of thing and will require reexamining, reassessing and reappraising what leadership looks like in a modern organisation and what is the individual’s role.
• Actually most organisations don’t ipso facto believe in either customer or employee experience. The vast majority of companies are still focused on survival and profitability in quarterly results.
• We are seeing a rising demand for empathy in customer interactions. But, if you haven’t inscribed empathy within the core of your system then it’s unlikely that your employees are going to serve your customers with empathy.
• So, on the question of employees or customers first….you’ve got to get the employees experience right first.
• You have to model the behaviour that you want your team to embrace.
• Some CEOs and their teams spend days every month with their customer service team manning the phones every month. In doing that they are showing that customer service is important and they are learning directly what is going on at the coal face.
• That is a fundamental way to get your organisation to become more customer centric.
• Doing something like this is not enough. You have to keep doing it as you will both accumulate stories and insight that will become the backbone of your decision making in the future and it will create a ripple effect of trust amongst your employees. This will help open up a communication channel with your employees who, if you are lucky, will hopefully become your trusted advisors.
• However, to get started doing that sort of thing you have to think carefully about how you get started with this and how you continue it. You don’t want your employees to think they are being monitored or that it’s not sincere or won’t last.
• Think through your intentionality
• Minter’s Punk CX word(s): antiestablishmentanterism
• Minter’s Punk CX brand: Tony Hsieh (RIP) and Zappos

About Minter

Minter Dial is an international professional and energetic speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialized in leadership, branding and transformation. An agent of change, he’s a three-time entrepreneur who has exercised twelve different métiers and changed country fifteen times. Minter’s core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division.

He’s the author of the award-winning WWII story, The Last Ring Home (documentary film and biographical book, 2016) as well as two prize-winning business books, Futureproof (2017) and Heartificial Empathy (2019). His latest book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader (KoganPage) has just been released.

He’s been host of the MinterDialogue weekly podcast since 2010. He is passionate about the Grateful Dead, Padel Tennis, languages and generating meaningful conversations.

Check out the book – You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader, his site minterdial.com, say Hi to him on Twitter and Instagram @mdial and @mdial respectively and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay