Free The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

make memorably good – or bad – customer experiences. Like why were we handing out hot towels to our newly boarded passengers on a boiling hot Las Vegas day? Wouldn’t cold towels make a lot more sense?
    I have always found that having senior people who demonstrably care enough to pay attention to customer-focused nitty-gritty details – as opposed to just the stock price – serves to encourage everyone in the organisation to get into the habit of seeing what you look like from the outside in. A domino benefit is that middle managers don’t want a senior officer to be the first to tell them how their part of the operation looks from the other side of the fence, especially if they’ve never troubled to set foot over there themselves!
    As an example of continually attempting to ‘see yourself as others see you’, now that Virgin Hotelsis opening its doors I will be encouraging our hotel managers to regularly spend (unannounced) nights sleeping in random empty rooms in their properties. Just spending a few minutes inspecting a room during the day doesn’t give any clue as to what paying guests experience while sleeping there for the night. If you want to fully grasp what you are selling then you have got to see it from the customer’s perspective – or in this case when you’ve made the bed then you’ve got to sleep in it too!
    While on the subject of hospitality, perhaps the boldest management initiatives I’ve ever witnessed was in a Florida property used by Virgin Holidays. The manager there had put his picture, name and phone numbers – office, cell phone and home – inside every elevator. The note with it read something along the lines of, ‘If there is any problem during your stay that is not resolved to your satisfaction by our staff, please feel free to give me a call.’ When I asked him if this hadn’t been a problem, his response was, ‘For me – not at all: for my staff maybe. I made sure they know how much I dislike getting disturbed when I’m at home with the family.’ He then added that in the year the signs had been in place he’d maybe received a couple of calls a month – a great example of the senior person putting themselves on the front line 24/7!
    When I was hands-on CEO at Virgin Atlantic I did something similar with our staff. I’d write them a letter every month with an update on how things were going and – before cell phones and email – gave them my home address and home phone number if they wanted to get in touch with me. And, as with the Florida hotel manager, on the rare occasions they did I was always delighted to hear what they had to say.
    C YOURSELF AS THE COMPETITION SEES YOU
    Running a business would be a lot easier if finding a leader were as simple as handing out impressive titles like CEO, president, managing director or whatever. A fancy corporate title with a ‘C’ in front of it might open doors (once at least) or get more people to take a phone call, but it doesn’t guarantee the levels of respect and influence that are the marks of a real leader – those who earned the position as opposed to merely having it bestowed upon them. To this day, too many businesses still view the top job as being the prerogative of the ‘next in line’ who has diligently put in their years as the number two person in the corporate pecking order. That might work in royal families but it certainly doesn’t always get it done in a lot of business situations.
    Middle management can make or break a company so having good departmental leaders at all levels is vital to any business – but not every good manager is going to naturally grow into a senior leadership role. It certainly happens in a number of cases, but it’s no given. Too often when the number two person is moved up it is done to ensure continuity in the way the firm is run, which usually translates to ‘business as usual’ or protecting the prior incumbent’s legacy. This may make sense with some highly