Shannon Banks - Key steps to better engage your people and your customers

And now I guess I'm going to argue that being a social leader doesn't actually depend on technology at all. I think it's about a mind shift change and behavioral changes that don't necessarily need technology. The idea with reverse mentoring is you take your millennial, Gen Y, Gen Z employees, and you set up mentoring relationships with your senior leaders, your senior executives.

But instead of having your senior leaders mentor your Gen Y, Gen Z, You do that in reverse, and you have a reverse mentoring. This works amazingly effectively in terms of helping a more traditional leader learn new behaviors and mindsets. It's very easy to do and leaders can be amazingly surprised at the things that they can learn that they would never have thought about by doing that.

One kind of creative thing that's slightly more difficult to implement, but worked amazingly well that I did during my time at Microsoft, was set up a leadership development program where we found some strategic customers, partners, who were facing issues in the emerging markets. And we brought our high potential leaders there, and we worked on our partners challenges.

As part of our leadership development. So anything like that, that can engage your employees with your customers, has huge benefit in terms of creating connection. Because remember, it's not just connection with your employees, it's connections with your customers and society as well. That's expected.

Getting out of your standard workplace, and going and seeing your customers, your competitors, Actually, out wherever they are. So, one of the things we did, for example, at Microsoft, when we moved into the devices space, was send our senior executives into the retail stores, where they, we gave them a list of things to observe, a list of questions to observe, and they went and looked at how the Microsoft phones were positioned next to the iPhones, and how the staff were talking about, and thought about.

I mean, they would disclose, you know, I'm from Microsoft, you know, what do you think of this phone? And they got amazing feedback and information on what was going on in the actual stores. I think getting HR people out. So get the functions that are not normally outseeing customers, outseeing customers.

And it has a massive impact on people's ability to think strategically and frankly their happiness because they're connected then with what the business is doing. It increases satisfaction. If you can get a leader to shift behavior, then you get the organization under that leader and around that leader to shift behavior.