The Exkalibur Leadership Forum is a group of senior executives and business leaders, running companies from $10-100 million in annual revenue, who meet on a regular basis to build their leadership skills, enhance their executive education and share their insights and experiences to help each other make better decisions and improve their Company’s performance. Please visit our Exkalibur Leadership Forum main page for further information.

Great Customer Service

During the July – September, 2011 quarter, we focused our Best Practices series on customer service, more broadly, on the “service” aspect of our businesses: how do we make sure we’re always serving our clients and adding value to their businesses? We discussed several video presentations about great service companies like Amazon, the Container Store and Zappos where service is a cornerstone of their culture, which served to re-ignite earlier conversations: Can an “employee-first” company can truly make certain that customers are also “first”? How do we embed the notion of a “great customer experience” throughout our companies?

The Key Attributes of Successful Businesses

We also focused intently during this quarter on some of the key attributes of successful companies – what makes them great? What do they do differently from others? We discussed a variety of articles about the leadership and cultural characteristics that set apart high-performance companies like Apple, Caterpillar and Ford. It generated a lot of conversation that ended up on our white board as we identified the most important characteristics of these successful businesses and their leaders.

What is Strategy?

We also started during this quarter to really examine Strategy: What is it? How is it created? How is it executed? Library shelves are overflowing with books about strategy so we focused intently on a few of the landmark articles that capture the essence of strategy and why the most successful companies focus so intently on strategy formulation and execution. This is an important theme that will carry us into the 4^th quarter as well as we consider proven ways to engage your leadership team to create a powerful strategy and take the actions needed to implement it across the company.

Member Problem-Solving Sessions

Several members also sought the collective counsel of the group about some of the particularly challenging issues they’re facing. Many of these problem-solving conversations involved issues that greatly benefited from the insights and experience of the CEOs and business leaders in the Exkalibur Leadership Forum.

Executive Plan Update

On a regular basis, each member shares their progress toward the goals and objectives set forth in the Annual Executive Plan, prepared by each executive during the 4th quarter of the year. The plan is updated quarterly, with concrete financial performance criteria as well as an active discussion about the achievements, shortcomings and concerns experienced in the pursuit of the individual, team and company goals they have set for the year.

Other Practical Strategies

Here are some of the other practical strategies that we discussed during this quarter:

–  The value of positive feedback and how to deliver it … to not only take corrective actions … but to improve individual performance so that teammates can accelerate their contributions by capitalizing on their strengths.

–  Proven Personal Productivity tips and techniques are often part of our meetings, as each of us struggle to deal with the flow of information, email, social media and other time-eating distractions that impede our progress toward our goals and a meaningful work/life balance.