The arts world presents us with a lens that demonstrates the importance of getting it right for your audience. No audience = no show. It’s not complicated. With tens of millions of pounds being invested in a show, the stakes are high. Does that guarantee a success? Of course not. If it doesn’t land for the audience, it hasn’t worked. If you have the cash, time and resources to ‘create theatre’ for the sake of it and to massage your own artistic pleasure, lucky you. For most though, that is not the reality. Leading an organization places a responsibility on you to know your audience well, to know what they want and to be one step ahead in delivering that. Ignore them at your peril …

‘The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.’

Oscar Wilde

I adore that quote. Just for a moment, it can ease the pain when your performance falls flat on its backside – oh the light relief that can come from blaming your audience …

Shockingly, I stumble across many leaders that take up residence in that thinking:

• ‘If it hasn’t worked, it’s their fault for not getting it.’
• ‘They said they wanted it like that, and that’s what they got.’
• ‘Tough! They’re just a difficult customer.’
• ‘Oh well. Most people liked it so that’s not really my problem …’
• ‘Who cares what they want?!’

I have heard all of those comments. Yes, honestly. When I heard the last one, I spluttered my coffee in a rather ungainly fashion all over the poor lady in front of me! The chap that made the comment, genuinely acted from that THINKING – ‘Who cares what they want?!’

This Jolt is quite simple really: It’s not about YOU; it’s about your audience. This is another core practice of your journey towards extraordinary. A pre-requisite of adopting the Artful approach is to step into this Jolt. Failing to take this one on for yourself leaves you running the risk of being an orchestrator of the ordinary. And you don’t want that, do you? Do you?!

For a cast of actors and singers, delivering eight shows a week in front of an audience always presented a clear indication to us of what was working and what wasn’t. It was a moment by moment feedback loop. On the big shows, we were confident that we would have a full house for every performance. It was rarely a problem getting the bums on seats. In the long term of course, the measure of success was continuing to have full houses, night after night.

• For you in your business, what is your longer term measure for success?
• More customers?
• Repeat customers?
• Continued revenue?
• World domination?
• Acquisition?
• A culture that people want to connect with?
• …?

For you to achieve extraordinary things, using any one of those measures, means you must pay close attention: spot trends, listen, respond, think ahead, look around you …

You know that though don’t you? We will talk about that more later on in the book. Although, despite my asking you a question that I assume you would say yes to, I have been introduced to new clients over the years that have wanted to be successful, have used more than one of the measures above and yet still haven’t delivered what their audience wanted.

Why was that?

Well, one reason was that they had become so immersed in what they were delivering and stuck in their own heads that they failed to spot the many choice points that they had where there was the possibility to add even more value to their audience. They had become consumed with their own greatness: ‘We’re marvellous, we have fabulous clients, we get good feedback …’ They would keep running this loop and didn’t spot soon enough that listening to any internal chatter on repeat, means taking up residence inside your own head and not being where the action is.

Whether you run your own empire or help someone else to run theirs, you do need clarity on your long-term measure of success. It might be one from the list above, and the likelihood is that you will have your own specific measurable.

Perhaps the greater challenge is not for those that sit at the top of their organizations, but for those that need to translate the vision and make it real across the rest of the organization. Many of my clients tell me, on a regular basis, that people across their business are far too disconnected from their audience. They are busy being busy: churning out widgets because that’s what their job description says, yet having little understanding of whether what they do each day touches the audience and hits the success measure button.

Theatre is intimate. You know whether the audience is with you. You need only look and listen to get the insight. For big organizations it is not always as straightforward as that, as you may be working within multiple levels of hierarchy and therefore further away from seeing what really lands.

So, what is the solution for you?

As a leader, start the conversation. Yep, that’s the beginning point. How often do you have a dialogue with your team that Jolts them into considering your audience? I see some of my client teams do this on a daily basis. I see many that never have the conversation.

Why is that?

Because they don’t care enough, because it isn’t relevant to them, because they are too busy, because it’s not their job, because they don’t really know who their audience is …?

Well, what questions do you need to be asking?

• Who is your audience?

  Don’t be fooled into thinking that ‘audience’ simply means your customers. Your audience is the people that you need to connect and engage with to make stuff happen. In your working day, your audience will constantly shift: the sales team, marketing, your CEO, the board, suppliers, your team, your family, the people that run your reception desk … it’s an endless list. This is why the questions have to become a habit. You cannot just ask them once a year at a team off-site!

• What is important to them?

  Take a moment to step into the world of your audience: what do they expect from you? What matters to them most? What have they told you in the past about what works and what doesn’t work for them? Have you acted on that? What is their measure of success? What does extraordinary look like for them?

• How do you know you are delivering?

  What signs are you looking for to see if your audience is happy, connected, excited, inspired, moved …? Are you out there listening and looking? Are you present and reacting to what you notice?

• So, are YOU having the conversation?
• Are you asking these questions of yourself and your team?
• If you are asking the right questions, are you asking them regularly enough?

If you aren’t having these conversations, it can only mean one thing – your focus is locked deeply inside your head, the heads of your team and the micro world that you have created around you. It’s easily done, I recognize that. And as much as that might be a place of huge comfort for you, it will not be your winning ticket to extraordinary. It just can’t be.

As we discussed right up front, the world is moving at a frightening pace. No organization, team or leader can rely on just churning out the same old stuff day in, day out. As audience members ourselves, our choices over where we buy from are expanding daily and most of us will take advantage of that by shopping around. The internet has created a massive explosion of choice and we don’t have to do much digging around before we find alternatives; some better, some worse.

I am under no illusion whatsoever that my customers can, at any minute, up sticks and find a coach, consultant or speaker that is more extraordinary than me. There are lots out there. If I become complacent and spend too much time thinking about me, without focusing on my audience, it won’t be long before the audience is gone …

It IS all about your audience. You will soon discover that the moment you start to THINK this and take the relevant ACTION, you will begin the transformation process.