Frances Frei > Quotes

“Leadership, at its core, is about making other people better as a result of your presence—and making sure that the impact lasts in your absence.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“What’s hard is designing a service model that allows average employees—not just the exceptional ones—to produce service excellence as an everyday routine.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customers value most, and then making it possible—profitable and sustainable—by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence.1 Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power. And not only when you’re in the trenches with them, but also when you’re not around, and even (this is the cleanest test) after you’ve permanently moved on from the team.”
― Frances Frei, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

“Self-awareness is the key to skillfully playing the “instrument” of your emotions and preventing your feelings from sabotaging your change story. Accepting your emotions, integrating them into your actions, is also an opportunity to build trust and reinforce authenticity. The opposite—trying to suppress or deny what you’re feeling (what, me vulnerable?)—is an inauthenticity tell that’s easy to read. To help you get there and make peace with what you’re feeling, below are ten emotions that deserve more respect at work.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“Progressive started out by targeting its biggest buckets of cost—fraud, disputed claims, and legal fees—and then worked out from there to find ways to dress up the cost savings as value-added service. This is the secret to the second funding mechanism: sequence matters. Start with costs.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Hill makes the case that excellence actually requires conflict between different ideas and approaches. As Jim Morris, the president of Pixar Animation Studios, told Hill, “If you have no conflict, you’re going to have something that’s pretty average.”50”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“Choosing bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Speed unleashes your organization’s energy and reveals where you’re going. Trust convinces your stakeholders to come along for the ride.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“In our experience, the number one obstacle to great service—number one by a long shot—is the emotional unwillingness to embrace weakness.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Spend time with your Team on a very regular basis, no less than monthly.47”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“When companies pay customers to try out their products and services, it’s a customer acquisition program. When companies invest in activities that increase customers’ willingness to pay a premium price, then they have a loyalty program.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“For example, when Google spent years trying to rigorously explain differences in performance across its own highly skilled teams—a project they code-named “Aristotle”—the company concluded that psychological safety explained “everything.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“Many of these projects were simple product fixes with the best chance of boosting sales quickly. For example, many Etsy shoppers were nervous about using their credit cards with small, unknown vendors they didn’t yet trust, so the company prioritized adding a message to the site: “The seller never sees your credit card information.”32 Silverman called these fixes ambulances and focused the team on implementing them in days and weeks rather than months.33 His ambulances paid off with an almost-immediate increase to revenues.34”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“There are four ways to fund a premium service experience: (1) get customers to pay you extra for it, (2) reduce costs in ways that also improve service, (3) improve service in ways that also reduce costs, or (4) get customers to enjoy doing some of the work for you. Method 1 is the simplest, at least.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“We’ve seen this pattern across excellent service organizations, regardless of industry, geography, or positioning. Like Commerce, these organizations do a lot of things well, but they also—counterintuitively—do certain things badly. Really badly. Their trick is to make sure that the bad is in service of the great, and then to be unapologetic about it.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Counterintuitively, emotional mastery can sometimes look to the outside world like doing nothing at all. We’re going to set a high bar for this one, which is to take leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln. As our colleague Nancy Koehn explores in her fascinating study of crisis leadership, Lincoln was able to resist taking immediate action, even in the face of extraordinary pressure to do something, anything in response to apparent disaster. Koehn writes, “In our own white-hot moment, when so much of our time and attention is focused on instantaneous reaction, it seems almost inconceivable that nothing might be the best something we can offer.”33 And yet history suggests that it’s sometimes the right move. Slowing down your reaction time can allow you to move faster as an organization, particularly when it helps you avoid unforced errors, a topic for tomorrow.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“Customers can increase the cost and reduce the quality of whatever service you’re providing, often with no advance warning and very little regret.”
― Frances Frei, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Psychological safety, which Edmondson sometimes refers to as interpersonal fearlessness, is the foundation on which the rest of your company’s hopes and dreams are built.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“The leader’s mood is quite literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business…. The same holds true in the office, boardroom, or shop floor; group members inevitably “catch” feelings from one another.”26 When you step up to leadership, whether you like it or not, there’s no option to turn off the broadcast feature on whatever you’re feeling.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

“organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get…. if you don’t like the results, you need to change the design.”
― Frances Frei, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems