Lead by focusing on service

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This is the fourth in a series of articles about leadership. My first article established the five lessons of leadership. The second article, Lesson 1, showed why "You must be up front and objective oriented!" Lesson 2 argued "You must be up-to-date and farsighted!" 

We know strategic leadership is about creating vision and inspiring people to change. Leadership sets the whole change process in motion. Leaders incite action by setting dynamic cost objectives, establishing new supply relationships that foster efficiencies and effectiveness, and empowering people. These concepts depend on the ability to get other people actively involved in building and supporting the process. You can shake your organization to its roots when your people are involved and committed. 

Here in Lesson 3, I will show how being "service focused" contributes to the leadership process.

In the old days, great leaders were servants to their people. They took great pains to ensure their people were served. It’s still true, but now we call it "customer focus." In MRO supply management, everyone is our customer. The operations process must work smoothly and correctly, facilities must be clean with the utilities functioning, our suppliers must be satisfied, etc.

Our people must know that increasing customer service ensures organizational objectives and personal objectives are met. Training, delegation, empowerment, and support for people and teams build customer service. Let’s examine these concepts in detail.

Training builds your people’s abilities to exceed stated goals.

Internal and external customers seek better service. Untrained or poorly trained people can’t meet the needs of customers in most organizations today. Training is a demanding process. As leaders, we must identify areas where the business process has real or potential problems and demand that our people have the training to solve those problems, now and into the future. 

It isn’t sufficient to just make training available. Leaders must ensure it’s available, that people participate, that they learn and, equally important, that they apply the new knowledge to solve or (even better) prevent problems. 

The practical application of "training to solve problems" motivates people to the training process. Use recognition to reinforce training and problem solving.

Delegation puts responsibility planning and problem-solving work in people’s hands. 

Effective leaders collaborate and share information to build trust, and build people. In a sense, delegation and collaboration are training processes. They ensure people are fully involved and utilized. 

Empowerment gets people involved in the challenge of organizational survival. 

Today, everyone should understand survival depends on external and internal customer service. 

Almost all of us have a basic need for intrinsic satisfaction. We appreciate challenge and expect to succeed. Successful leaders share planning and problem solving with their people to provide ongoing challenge. Help your people believe that they own their job.

Support for your people and teams helps them understand that the training they received or will receive exceeds the challenges they accepted from delegation and empowerment. 

Support also means having the physical resources to do the job. Successful leaders do these things in five ways:

1) Understand themselves: We know who and what we are, and we seek to improve.

2) Involve our people in planning and decisions: Participation builds trust and risk taking.

3) Continuously train and build our people: Professional development is never done.

4) As people grow, expand delegation and empowerment: More gets done better.

5) Provide the requisite support: Everything happens on schedule.

If you doubt the power of sound leadership, reread the articles about Harley-Davidson from the June/July issue. Harley-Davidson made it happen. You can, too!

Robert Kemp is a consultant, speaker and the former president of the National Association of Purchasing Management. He can be reached at

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