A business leader standing in a conference room while a faded customer figure sits across the table.

Why Customer Research Is Really A Leadership Test

Asking customer research questions is easy. Getting department heads aligned is the real test.

Companies love saying they care about customers. They put it in the decks, say it in all-hands meetings and build campaigns around being “customer-first” and “customer-obsessed.”

Then someone suggests actually talking to customers and the room gets super tense.

Suddenly, there are a litany of concerns and you end up hearing lots of statements like “We already know this” and “Let’s not slow down.”

All of it is said with a sense of anxiety. 

To an outside observer the vibes filling the room must seem like the result of no one knowing how to conduct customer research. 

But that’s not it. People know how. Customer research methods are not hidden in a cave somewhere guarded by a dragon. 

The concern and anxiety around customer research stems from the fact that it creates customer truth.

And customer truth is inconvenient to just about every department in an organization because it threatens their version of the customer and the very human craving for credibility, status and control.

Every company I’ve ever worked for or consulted with has faced this issue at some point. 

I want to help folks avoid this. Because when it goes too far the business really starts paying for it. 

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Marketing leader reviewing performance dashboards and team connections to show why marketing success depends on people leadership

Why The Best Marketing Leaders Know the Hardest Part Of Marketing Leadership Isn’t Strategy & Execution 一 It’s The People.

If your marketing isn’t working, there’s a good chance it’s a people problem.

Modern work rewards visible activity. If you look busy, people assume you’re a top performer — even when that activity doesn’t move anything forward.

So it’s not surprising that leadership, particularly in marketing, has fallen into this same trap where activity gets mistaken for leadership.

Today, many marketing leaders believe leadership is pointing to others and saying, “Do.”

Then they get to work on the business of said “real” leadership: emails, edits, pings and “Just checking in 一 done yet?” messages on Slack.

But emails and edits aren’t leadership.

It can look like leadership from the outside, but it’s performance. And performance is demanding. It leaves little room for actual leadership — establishing clarity, aligning teams, providing context and lining people up to deliver on projects and hit goals.

When you’re stuck performing, things like empathy, curiosity, patience and investment in others are the first things to go because they start to feel like annoying “delays.”

And that’s no bueno in a big way because those are the very things that make leadership and collaboration work at all.

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