There is a conversation happening inside your business right now that you are probably not part of.
It’s happening between your employees, in the stockroom, on break, in the group chat on the way home. It’s about what it feels like to work for you: whether leadership is clear, whether they are supported, whether the effort they give is noticed. And what they are saying in that conversation is, almost word for word, what your customers are experiencing on the floor.
Customers experience what employees feel. That is not a slogan. It’s the mechanism by which leadership creates customer experience. So the most useful thing a leaders can do is get into that conversation.
Why leaders avoid it
Almost every leader I talk to wants to know how their team really feels. Almost none of them ask directly. There are usually three reasons:
Fear of what they will hear. If the answer is uncomfortable, it becomes the leader’s problem to solve.
Not knowing how to respond. Many leaders worry they will get defensive, or promise something they can’t deliver.
Confusing it with a complaint session. A good version of this conversation is not venting. It’s the most valuable operating data you have access to.
The difference that matters is listening to understand versus listening to fix. The first builds trust. The second shuts the conversation down before it gets to the real issue.
What the conversation actually looks like
This is not a survey or a focus group. It’s a direct, genuine conversation, one-on-one or in a small group, with people you lead. Three questions open it up:
What is working well right now that you want to make sure we protect? Start here. It tells you what to keep, and it makes the harder answers easier to give.
What is making your job harder than it needs to be? This surfaces operational friction, such as scheduling, product flow, or unclear priorities, that leaders rarely see from the office.
What do you need from me that you are currently not getting? This is the leadership question. Expect a pause. The answer is usually simple and usually fixable.
I once noticed an employee who seemed to be checked out and their performance was starting to slip… After a conversation with them, they shared with me that their requests of for family or celebration moments weren’t getting approved by our boss and felt they were having to miss out on so many precious moments - which, in return, was causing them to loose their steam and become uninterested in fully showing up (it became a chore instead of something they enjoyed). That one conversation has changed how I lead teams. I make scheduling the number one thing I do for my team, and in return I have had present teams with an extremely low call out rate.
What to do with what you hear
The conversation only matters if something changes as a result. Not everything, but something. Choose one thing you hear, fix it visibly, and tell the team you did it because of what they shared. One visible response is worth more than a hundred open-door policies.
Be honest about the rest. If you can’t change something, say so and say why. Teams forgive a “not right now” far more easily than silence.
The brands where employees feel genuinely heard are the brands where customers feel genuinely welcomed. The path between those two things runs through leadership, one honest conversation at a time.
If you want help understanding what your team experience is creating, we can look at it together. Start with a conversation, and get the weekly Dans le Cadre newsletter for one leadership insight and one practical questions every week
