Service Culture as a Growth Engine. The Part That Cannot Be Bought.
"Can we cut the high-level BS and talk about how we are going to make 1,500 employees deliver a better service experience in the operation, without spending millions on training?"
That was my intro meeting with Johnnie Müller, then Vice President of Security Services and Crisis Response at Copenhagen Airport.
I had just joined as Service Excellence Director after coming from Tivoli Gardens. I really wanted to impress him and was talking about journey mapping, Kahneman's peak-end rule and service principles.
It is one of the best questions I have ever been asked.
How will the great ideas make it into reality?
How will they integrate into operations?
How will this support the business?
How do we get employees and leaders on board?
That is what he was asking.
Questions that I now know most service culture programmes never answer.
In that moment, I did not have the answer either. But guided by Johnnies sharp, relevant questions and the pressure of having to deliver service excellence in a high pressure 24 / 7 -365 operation where compliance and efficiency must not be compromised, I learned.
Service culture becomes a growth engine only when leaders own it and organisational rhythms keep it alive
Without both, you are paying for training and fancy strategy slides that evaporate the second there is real work to do.
Most organisations buy a service model from a supplier. They run a few training days. The content is often detached from the actual challenges employees and leaders face day to day. Two weeks later, the floor has forgotten. Eighteen months later, leadership buys another training. The cycle repeats.
You can use training to kickstart the conversation. But before you run it, map the work that comes after. When will leaders reinforce it? When will you circle back? How will you support the employees doing the work? How will you measure whether anything stuck?
Training is a short-term initiative. Think long-term or it will fade. And you will have to do it all over again a year later. An enormous waste of money, time and energy for everyone involved.
If you want service culture to compound and yield results over time, you have to stop treating it as a frontline competency and think of it as building culture and habits.
Start with the pain your employees and customers feel most often
When I work with clients who want better service, my first questions are always the same. What are the pain points your employees experience most often? What are the pain points your customers report? Fix those.
This is where business potential is hidden. It is also plain logic: give employees tools to deal with the most difficult situations first. They will move through the rest faster. And integrate your efforts with leadership while you do it.
Without organisational rhythms, the conversation dies
Even with strong leadership, the conversation about service slips. Something else demands attention. A new crisis, a new system, someone quits, a new regulation. Service slides to the bottom of the agenda. Three months later it is gone again.
This is the part most CX programmes get wrong. They run an offsite. They produce a strategy. Then nobody owns the rhythm of conversation week to week. It is rarely embedded in day-to-day life or in the processes performed daily. The rhythm is what makes culture compound. It is what turns culture into results. If you do not have an ongoing, relevant conversation and organisational rhythms and processes to hold it, you will not have a service culture. You will have service ambition.
The CEO question is not "should we do a service training?"
The CEO question is: do we want this to be a strategic decision that shapes how we operate and supports the business, or do we want to keep paying for short-term training that evaporates every eighteen months?
Service culture becomes a growth engine when leaders own it, organisational rhythms keep it alive, and the work is embedded in how the operation runs. Not added on top. None of those three is a training course. It has to be developed with employees, leaders and top management. It takes time. But what you get is not training. You get culture. And the business results that follow are tangible.
For a CEO, the decision is whether to buy training that evaporates every eighteen months, or invest in a long-term change in how the organisation operates. The first feels easier and cheaper. It is not.
For a CX leader, the work is harder than running training. It is rewriting procedures so service is inside them. Asking the floor what friction they hit every day and solving it. That is not soft work. It is the difference between a service culture that compounds and a service ambition that fades.
The leaders who treat service culture as a long-term investment in how work is done keep winning. The leaders who treat it as a training problem keep paying for it twice.
Hear Johnnie Müller at Experience Management Nordic Summit in Copenhagen. MAY 7 2026
Johnnie Muller, who asked me that question years ago at Copenhagen Airport, is one of nine speakers at Experience Management Nordic Summit on 7 May 2026 in Copenhagen.
Since he was Senior Vice President Security Services in Copenhagen Airport he co-founded Copenhagen Security Excellence and when he steps onto the stage at the Experience Management Nordic Summit, he shares how a service culture that holds up under pressure was built and what he did to win World's Best Airport Security Experience four times.
Get your ticket here: exmsummit.dk