Brands meticulously map the customer journey but often ignore the employee experience. To build a strong culture, apply the same brand principles to every employee touchpoint—from the job offer to their first day—to ensure everyone is aligned and delivering on the brand's promise.

To ensure its team-oriented culture is more than just talk, Gryphon ties 25% of employee performance bonuses to subjective factors like soft skills, personal development, and cultural contribution. This is supported by 360-degree reviews to standardize evaluations and prevent "grade inflation" among different teams.

Elf uses a unique compensation model where every employee's bonus (from 0-200%) is tied to the same company-wide adjusted EBITDA metric. This aligns operations, sales, and marketing on a shared financial fate, fostering cross-functional collaboration and a strong sense of ownership.

To prove financial impact and ensure rigor, CIBC's CX team funds a dedicated data scientist who sits within the central enterprise analytics team. This structure gives them access to enterprise data while building credibility for their ROI models with other departments.

Truly customer-obsessed leaders don't delegate the definition of key metrics. Like Jeff Bezos specifying how to measure package delivery speed, they personally architect the measurement systems to ensure the entire organization optimizes for what customers actually value.

By communicating that only five customers per flight made the difference between profit and loss, Southwest's management made the abstract concept of profitability tangible for its 15,000+ employees. This showed every employee that their interactions directly impacted the bottom line.

To operationalize its customer-centric principles, CIBC integrated CX into its enterprise delivery framework. CX team involvement from day one is a formal, mandatory gate for any new client-facing project to receive funding, ensuring consistent, client-focused design.

To ensure brand is a shared responsibility, Ally includes brand health KPIs on the scorecards of the CEO, CFO, and other business leaders. This elevates brand from a marketing concern to a core business objective, fostering cross-functional alignment and accountability.

To ensure accountability for societal impact, Mars directly links 40% of its CEO's compensation to non-financial metrics, including sustainability goals. This structure challenges the conventional, finance-only incentive models prevalent in public companies and hardwires long-term purpose into executive performance.