What if Customer Experience and Employee Experience aren’t separate initiatives at all, but direct reflections of leadership behavior?
In this return visit to Your Customer, Your Success, Kris Wauters joins Gary Marra to explore the deeper truth behind CX, EX, and leadership through the lens of his new book, The Human Experience: Dancing with the Dragon, Climbing Beyond the Tower.
This conversation moves beyond slogans and frameworks and into the real work of leading humans. Kris draws from more than 30 years of leadership experience to explain why customer centricity isn’t a goal you achieve, why most CX programs collapse when leadership changes, and why incompetence, not malice, is often the real enemy inside organizations.
Gary and Kris dig into practical CX discipline, including why too many metrics destroy accountability, how listening to the Voice of Customer, Voice of Employee, and Voice of Process together changes everything, and why the most mature organizations stop apologizing for problems and start preventing them.
The episode then shifts into leadership and culture, where Kris challenges the idea that culture can be “reinvented,” explains the difference between managing and truly leading, and makes a simple but powerful case for care, trust, and accountability as the foundation of sustainable performance.
This is not a conversation about quick wins or transformation theater. It’s about building organizations where CX and EX are outcomes of conscious leadership, not side projects owned by a department.
If you lead people, serve customers, or are responsible for experience, trust, and performance at scale, this episode will challenge how you think about all three.
CHAPTERS
00:54 Introduction
04:23 What breaks the human experience loop inside organizations?
07:18 Why customer centricity is not a goal
09:59 Incompetence vs malice in leadership
10:16 Learning to be a Leader
14:27 How leaders create trust and real feedback cultures
21:13 VOC, VOE, and VOP explained
27:42 Why too many CX metrics kill progress
34:04 The Museum of Retired Apologies
36:47 When culture works against the customer
40:22 Leadership vs management and “show me you care”
42:12 Does It Hold Water?
47:21 Chip Shots
Kris’s Book
https://a.co/d/0cmLbvD2
Connect with Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwauters/
🔗 Connect with Gary Marra:
· LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marra/
· Marra CX Hub: https://marracxhub.com/
· YouTube: YCYS YouTube Page
📣 🎧 Please Listen & Subscribe
💡 Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review if you enjoyed the episode!
👉 Follow Your Customer, Your Success for more insights on customer experience, leadership, and business strategy.
Want to be a guest on Your Customer, Your Success?
Send Gary Marra a message on PodMatch here:
https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1726154102094403cb5558fc4
#CX #CustomerSuccess #ClientExperience #Leadership #FractionalLeadership #GrowthStrategy #TeamAlignment #Podcast #BusinessLeadership #CustomerExperience