Читать книгу A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services - Valerie Mathieu - Страница 19

The quality of management, and especially middle management, is widely considered to be the essential foundation for implementing customer orientation (Hartline et al. 2000). This is all the more true in a service environment where proximity to the field, the market and the customer is strong. The managerial challenge is twofold: managers must be personally involved in a customer orientation and must also lead their team in the direction of a customer orientation. They must set an example, be a reference in terms of behavior and attitude for their team. Their decisions and arbitrations must clearly show the priority given to the customer. They will also have to be attentive to the way in which their team lives this customer orientation. Customer relations and customer satisfaction are not always easy realities for employees. They must also encourage collaboration between teams, functions and departments. It is up to managers to allow their teams to break out of their strictly defined perimeters. There cannot be customer orientation without autonomy and risk-taking. Expected managerial skills are, therefore, inevitably enriched. While traditional skills, like technical skills for an engineer, remain essential, they are no longer sufficient to effectively implement customer orientation. This customer orientation becomes particularly sensitive in the context of the implementation of entrepreneurial projects with high technical content.

Studies have looked at the leadership style that would be most conducive to the implementation of a customer orientation in the company. They highlight a specific leadership style called transformational leadership¹¹. The transformational leader succeeds in getting colleagues and collaborators to go beyond their personal interests, to converge in the same direction and to win their support by explaining and bringing meaning (Barabel and Meier 2015, p. 614).