00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 694 of the inspired stewardship podcast I met. And I'm Jocelyn from the Family life movement podcast. We challenge you to find a way to balance your work and your family. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardship podcast by my friend, Scott Mader Recognize too that looking at your team and empowering them is not the same as ignoring your customer.
00:00:41 It's not saying that your external customers are not important, but it is recognizing that to some level you have to put your internal team first. You have to put them before the external team, if you really want to serve your external welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:01:07 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world Today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why to be customer focused. You have to first focus on your internal customers.
00:01:39 I also talk with you about why focusing on your team gives you more reach and how to recognize why that isn't the same as ignoring your actual customers. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible.
00:02:05 Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. When working with business owners, I often talk to them and they often tell me about how there are customer focused business.
00:02:43 You know, that their focus is on making sure that their customers have a wow experience and that their customers are served and it gets service beyond belief so that their customers will talk about how great they are as a company. And, you know, honestly, that's awesome. That's the thing that I think every business should seek to do, whether it's me as a coach,
00:03:04 whether it's other people running a, a little small business where they're a print shop, whether it's somebody in an organization like a church, or whether it's in a nonprofit or a volunteer organization, a school, a PTA, whatever it is, when you look at companies, when you look at businesses, when you look at any group that serves some audience or some group of people,
00:03:29 you would hope that they're focused on their customers and they're focused on the needs of their customers and making sure that their customers have an experience beyond belief. That is so great that they are impressed with it and go away talking about how awesome it is. But one of the mistakes that I see people make is when they thinking about customers, they're focused so much on the external customer,
00:03:54 the customer that comes in from outside of the organization, that they ignore or neglect. What I like to call their internal customers. Their internal customers are their actual team members, their staff, the volunteers, the people that they pay. It doesn't matter. It's the folks that actually do the work because the truth is to have an external customer focus, to give your external customers that wow experience.
00:04:24 You first have to give your internal team that wow experience. You have to find a way to get them invested in the customer experience. And the only way to do that, or at least the only way that I've found is to actually focus on treating your internal customers better than you would believe to give them a wow experience to make yourself one of those places that everyone lists as the best place to work,
00:04:55 that everyone really wants to work there. And doesn't want to leave what you've done. That when you've created an environment and a culture where your team supports each other, lifts each other up helps each other, do their job. It gives you more reach. It gives you the ability to serve your customers even better when you empower your team and give them autonomy so that they can make decisions and that they can actually live their life in a way that really works for them so that they can show up at work and be their authentic self and not be afraid of retribution or not be afraid that others in the company will tear them down.
00:05:40 When they've looked to each other as their friends and their family, in a way, you know, if you think about it, most of us spend a lot of time with our coworkers. We spend a lot of time with the team members that we serve with an organizations. We spend almost more time with these other people than we do with our family,
00:06:02 who we live with In many, many cases. And yet all too often, we also look to these folks and we don't really think of them as people that we know, because the environment that's created where we're working or volunteering is one where it's a little cutthroat. We're all in it for ourselves. Recognize too, that looking at your team and empowering them is not the same as ignoring your customer.
00:06:29 It's not saying that your external customers are not important, but it is recognizing that to some level, you have to put your internal team first. You have to put them before the external team, if you really want to serve your external clients. Well, if you really want your customers to have a wow experience, your first step is to create a culture inside the organization that supports that and lives that out and shows that every day,
00:07:01 you know, there's a story about how back in the days of Southwest airlines early on, there was a customer who had complained about something and send it into customer service and had a problem. And customer service did all they could to help the person, but the person wasn't satisfied and they kept escalating it up the chain. And eventually it landed on the Herb's desk,
00:07:26 the man who ran the whole organization. And it basically said that unless he fired certain people within the organization, this customer was going to leave. And he looked into the situation and recognize that the truth was that his team had done all they could to help this person. And yet the person was still not satisfied. So he took out a notepad and he wrote a short note that said,
00:07:55 we will miss you. Now, the truth was he supported his internal team. That's one of the reasons that Southwest has such a tremendous company culture, because they do support their internal customers. First, they recognize that if they don't create Tim team members who are able to be human and make human decisions, like turning an airplane around and bringing it back because somebody missed it,
00:08:19 not through their own fault, but they're on their way to a funeral or something like that. I've seen the Southwest organization go above and beyond to provide customer service. And it's because first they provide that customer service to their own team. So whether you're involved in an organizational leadership, whether you're involved in a company, whatever you're involved in, what are you going to do to create that wow.
00:08:46 Experience first for your team. And that's what will allow you to create that wow. Experience for your external and customers. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling.
00:09:20 If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the U S you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time,
00:09:48 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.