Insights
By Julia Renaux
Insights on management, leadership, customer success, and business development
Management as a Form of Art
Would you agree with me if I said that the media often speak about leadership, overshadowing the importance of good management?
In my opinion, management can instead be viewed as a form of art, blending strategy, creativity, and human behaviour to achieve organizational goals.
Like an artist, a manager must balance various elements—resources, time, talent, and processes—to create a successful outcome. Just as an artist uses intuition and technique to shape a masterpiece, a manager must navigate complexity, adapt to changing environments, and inspire people to perform at their best.
In management, I see the “art” manifest in several key concepts, including Visionary Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Decision Making, and Adaptation.
In Visionary Leadership, Art consists of creating an attractive, and sustainable vision for the company's future and guiding teams toward that vision with inspiration and foresight, thereby avoiding change resistance. This vision is possible once you have defined the company's purpose, mission, and goals, which help manifest the big picture.
I see art in Emotional Intelligence, where it is crucial to understand and manage both self and others’ emotions to foster collaboration, solve conflicts, and build strong relationships. It is of ultimate importance to understand people’s struggles at work, assign them the right attention, and support your teammates. These are fundamentals for their psychological safety, ensuring positive and productive work environment.
Decision-making is an analytical art in which estimations, evaluations and analytical thinking under uncertainty, through both rational analysis and intuition, are similar to how an artist makes choices about techniques and methods.
Managers often need to think outside the box, just as an artist does when faced with creative challenges. It is not easy to think outside the box. Personally, I find that role-changing experiences might help you see the situation from another perspective. Recently, I've had the pleasure to help in a kitchen for a special event. This experience was inspiring and enlightening for topics I cherish, such as team building, efficiency, coordination, time management, innovation, and problem solving. This might be inspiring to Innovate Services or Products, problem-solving, and to stay competitive.
Like art that evolves with trends and new media, management practices must adapt to new ecosystems, technologies, market shifts, and societal and cultural changes. The best patterns should be chosen and constantly adapted to changes in the economy and in geopolitics.
This kind of management transcends mere administration: it requires a deep understanding of the company business, of people, systems and environments – as in mastering a form of art. Management deserves attention as much as leadership does.
The Importance of Customer Satisfaction for Business Success
Customer satisfaction is crucial for any business model, simply because the business process is about an exchange between people. Therefore, it should be valuable, bring ideas, solutions and improvements, be empathetic, bringing pleasure in working together. After all, people do business with those they value and appreciate.
In today’s highly competitive market, customer satisfaction has become a crucial component of business success. Regardless of the industry or business size, maintaining a strong focus on customer satisfaction is crucial for fostering long-term relationships, driving sales, and establishing a positive reputation. Businesses and relationships that prioritize the needs and expectations of their customers are more likely to experience sustainable growth and profitability.
So what does Customer Satisfaction truly mean? I join the opinion, it’s about empathetic communication and relationship on one hand and meeting or even exceeding customers’ expectations, on the other hand. By the way this is true whether we are talking about products or any kind of services. In fact, it reflects the customer’s overall experience with the brand – from the very first contact and purchase to post-sale support and beyond. Naturally, satisfied customers are more likely to return, make repeat purchases, and recommend the business to others.
The importance of Customer Satisfaction can be perceived from the impact it makes on Business Success, on Business Development and on Revenue Growth of the company. A satisfiend customer stays where he is and a low outflow often ensures the long-term viability of a business, where retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal to the firm, increasing lifetime customer value. Loyal customers also tend to be less sensitive to price changes, making them more profitable over time.
The importance of Customer Satisfaction is also reflected by happy customers becoming brand ambassadors. They share their positive experiences with friends, family, and social networks, creating powerful word-of-mouth promotion that can drive new customer acquisition without significant advertising expenses.
Moreover, in a competitive environment where it is difficult to differentiate a firm’s products and services, Customer Satisfaction can indeed turn into a Competitive Advantage. In fact, in a world where products and services are very much similar, excellent customer service and satisfaction can be the key differentiator. I am more than sure that businesses that can consistently deliver superior customer experiences are more likely to stand out and be seen in the marketplace.
The Importance of Growth and Business Development
In today’s fast-paced business environment, adaptability, growth and business development are essential for long-term success. Growth helps a company increase its market share, improve profitability and attract investment. It’s also key to staying competitive and adapting to perpetual change.
Business development, on the other hand, focuses on creating strategic opportunities, such as partnerships, merging & acquisitions, new markets, and innovative products that drive this growth. It’s about identifying the direction, where the business can go next and how to get there.
Together, growth and development have an important impact on business because they strengthen reputation, boost brand value, improve customer satisfaction, attract and retain talent, and drive innovation and resilience to uncertainty.
Obviously, companies and specialists that dedicate resources to both are much better equipped to navigate challenges, identify new opportunities, and remain competitive in a constantly evolving market.
In the process, setting clear and measurable goals in a time frame is the first thing to do, defining accurately what growth means and looks like in terms of revenues, customers, markets, market share and products. Break big goals into short-term milestones that are sustainable and measurable.
I usually conduct market research, which helps me to better understand the environment, competitors, gaps that I can reduce proposing solutions, and new trends.
One thing I never omit is investing in relationships and building strategic partnerships based on different knowledge and expertise. I work on strengthening customer relationships through accurate service-oriented approach and empathetical communication. A satisfied customer is undoubtedly the most valuable asset for any company in any field.
The empathetical communication should be meaningful and consistent. The reason why, a strong value proposition, regularly reviewed and improved, is fundamental for interacting with customers. It is for me a source of confidence, because once you identify your own Unique Selling Propositions, you are well-positioned in the competitive environment. But this is actually not enough. It is essential to be close to customers, which is why I often meet them and listen carefully to their needs, pains, visions of the future, solve their problems, and bring innovative solutions to them.
In fact, this perfectly explains why problem solving, solution providing and customer satisfaction are keys to Revenue Growth and Business Development.
The Importance of Team Building
It’s not a surprise and we all know that success rarely comes from solo efforts. Whether we are in a corporate world, private medium size company, start-up, school, university or a non-profit organization, collaboration is an engine that drives activity and progress. That’s where team building comes in not as one-time event but a continuous investment in relationships, communication and shared objectives.
In its essence team building is a process of turning a group of individual contributors into cohesive unit. It includes of course strategies, activities and experiences aimed to break barriers, improve communication, trust, collaboration and moral among team members. But more than just games or exercises, effective team building is strategic, intentional and aligned with organizational objectives.
One of the most immediate benefits of team building is better communication. In fact, many workplace conflicts stem come from misunderstandings, lack of clarity or lack of trust. Who would blame you? When you don’t know well your team members how can you possibly trust them? So, you should have opportunities to get out of common workplace and experience relationship with them outside usual work environment. Structured teambuilding activities can break down silos, improve interpersonal understanding and encourage open dialogue-leading to a more friendly, efficient and respectful communication.
Unnecessary to stress out that trust is foundational to any team. Without it, collaboration suffers and moral declines. To work well, any team member should feel in a psychological safety. That is possible when you have trust, mutual understanding derived from efficient communication, and you know you are supported. You know you are backed. Team building helps individuals see each other as reliable, competent and supportive which fosters mutual respect. When employees trust their coworkers, they are more willing to share ideas, ask for help and tackle challenges together.
Engaged teams are productive teams. Team building can re-boost energy in the team, reduce burnout and create a sense of belonging. Even small acts like recognizing efforts and achievements, celebrating milestones, can make a huge difference in employee satisfaction. Everybody knows that a happy employee has greater feeling of belonging to the brand identity and commits himself even more if not totally.
When people feel in psychological safety, backed by colleagues and comfortable with each other, they are more likely to have innovative ideas and to take creative risks first sharing with their environment. Team building creates a safe space for brainstorming where there’s no hierarchy, where people can share freely their thoughts, where diverse ideas are welcomed. This could be very helpful for the organization because ideas come from people who work hand on on questions where they have expertise. So new ideas come from people knowledgeable about what they do. In fact, these ideas are backed by knowledge, data and science.
There are so many ways to get together for a team building session. I have experienced several of them: cooking together and distributing roles not carrying about existing work hierarchy, thus activating interaction and understanding between managers and employees. Playing table tennis in teams: laughing together breaks barriers between colleagues. Playing bowling and having pizza together is another way you can enhance cross departments collaboration and improve understanding between employees. There are so many other ways to get together for team building sessions. Please let me know, might you need an idea.