RevRev Ep. 15 – Jo Mills
Innovation is the name of the game for Jo Mills. As Co-Founder & CXO at Fuel50, she sits at the unique intersection of employee experience and customer experience and with a front-row seat to the future of both disciplines. In this episode of RevRev, we discuss Jo’s role in establishing an outcome-based mindset and strategy for Fuel50, the power of transparency in a remote-work world, and the importance of operating in an empathetic way to serve employees and customers.
Episode Key Takeaways
1. Operate in an empathetic way – Jo explains how she thinks about using empathy to serve customers. It’s necessary to fully understand what your customers are trying to build in the short term but we should also be working to understand how the work impacts the individual over the long term. As we manage customers we should also be doing whatever we can to take the weight off of customers and create a path to outcome achievement. We need to guide them to achieve their goals but it starts with taking the time to understand them first.
2. Hire with customer success in mind – The team you build will determine the level of service you give to customers – if you aren’t hiring people who understand the importance of serving customers, and are aligned from day one, it becomes very difficult to deliver customer success. The customer needs to know that your team has their best interests at heart.
3. Understand each team member’s definition of success – As a leader, Jo embraces her responsibility to devise and activate a plan to help her employees grow throughout their career. She thinks about the best ways to craft roles that speak to an individual’s talents. In growing organizations, leaders have an opportunity to build the business around the employee’s talent and strengths to get the most out of their talent pool while also considering the aspirations of team members to grow and develop.
4. Over indexing on transparency builds trust – Transparency builds trust. Jo is a firm believer that one of the best ways to build trust, and in turn relationships, with your employees is for leaders to be transparent with the day to day dealings of a business. The pandemic and the new remote-work environment has created more uncertainty and questions about what is happening within an organization. With this, leaders must internalize the impact that this has on employees and take steps to over-index on becoming transparent to ensure information is being shared and employees are navigating the new environment with the leaders. You can’t predict what is going to happen tomorrow but can you can prepare every day to put yourself and your team in the best position to respond.