Tiffani Bova: Salesforce’s Growth Guru Explains Why Employees Must Come First

Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book “GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business.” She’s been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers. 

Along with Columbia University and Stanford University, Bova recently authored a study which averaged data from 1,000 brick and mortar stores of a major American retailer (Walmart? Target? She can’t reveal).  And the research proved what most of us have always suspected: there’s a causal relationship between employee satisfaction and well-being – and the revenues the stores produce. She not only found that the stores that “did the employee experience well,” elevated revenue – revenue per hour increased by a full fifty percent.

Bova’s confirming conclusion is that when leaders focus on employee satisfaction in the most sincerest of ways, “it produces hard financials, not the soft stuff.” Highly regarded in Silicon Valley for her work in creating bold strategies for sales and growth, she was previously a Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow at Gartner where she won the Thought Leadership award.

Our conversation digs into her research study and it’s guidance to all managers who lead front-line teams. How you treat them truly does affect the bottom-line, for better or worse.

By Mark C. Crowley

Mark C. Crowley is the author of Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century which has been taught in 11 American universities. He is a global speaker, leadership consultant and thought leader on the topics of workplace culture and employee engagement.