I saw two great posts this week—one from Johan Gedde on What Real CX Transformation Demands, and another from Alex Mead on Why CX as a Profession Has Failed.

Both point to the same truth: CX isn’t just about being a diplomat. Sometimes, you also need to be a rock thrower.

If you want to transform how your organization serves customers, you need to master two very different roles:

The Diplomat — building bridges, earning trust, and aligning stakeholders.
The Rock Thrower — calling out broken systems, challenging sacred cows, and refusing to accept surface-level fixes.

Most CX leaders lean too hard on being diplomats and focus on surface-level fixes, instead of identifying the underlying root causes.

Diplomats Earn Access

Diplomacy is essential because:

• CX cuts across silos—marketing, operations, tech, finance, HR, legal.
• People protect their turf. They fear change, budget impacts, and political fallout.
• You need relationships and trust to influence decisions you don’t directly control.

Diplomats:
✅ Translate customer pain into business language that executives understand.
✅ Build coalitions around shared goals.
✅ Keep conversations open so progress doesn’t get shut down prematurely.

But diplomacy alone won’t fix systemic issues.

Rock Throwers Drive Change

Sometimes, diplomacy isn’t enough.

I’ve seen too many CX leaders stuck managing surveys without the authority to fix the processes, systems, or incentives that cause customer pain. The result? Short-term fixes for symptoms, while the processes creating the problems stay untouched—and the same issues keep repeating.

Rock throwers:
✅ Call out root causes buried in policies and operational processes.
✅ Refuse to accept “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
✅ Push to connect CX to financial and operational realities.

The Balance

The best CX leaders know when to switch hats:

• Be a diplomat to earn a seat at the table.
• Be a rock thrower to make that seat count.

It’s a constant tension. Diplomacy keeps you employed. Rock throwing makes you effective.

Lean only on diplomacy, and you become a figurehead.
Lean only on rock throwing, and you risk being sidelined as the troublemaker nobody wants to deal with.

Diplomats keep the doors open. Rock throwers make sure something meaningful changes once you’re inside.

Sometimes, the best move you can make as a leader is to hire the diplomatic rock thrower—someone willing to challenge conventional thinking, call out broken processes, and ask the “Five Whys” instead of accepting easy answers.

Because CX isn’t about surface-level fixes. It’s about solving the root causes that impact revenue, costs, and customer loyalty.

Need a diplomatic rock thrower to challenge conventional thinking? Let’s chat