Coach Talk: The Empty Chair

Bob Craig

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s formidable CEO, periodically leaves one seat open at conference room tables and lets all those in attendance know that they should consider that seat occupied by their customer, whom he calls “the most important person in the room.” The interesting part about many of our organizations is that on your teams there are many actual customers watching you do business every day. When we ask ‘are you customer driven’ and ‘do you have a customer focus’, I wonder how they react watching you lead our company. That Empty Chair routine is an interesting one. Wonder what would happen if you routinely had an empty chair at your team meetings, your coaching sessions, your staff meetings and made that same announcement. I wonder what the reaction would be? It would be easy to ask, “And how could that help your customers?” wouldn’t it? It could not be a one time, flavor-of-the-month kind of thing. It would have to be what you were known for... a solid customer focus. 11+ million of them all crowding into that one chair sort of beats the ‘elephant in the room’ pretty significantly, doesn’t it?