Focusing on customers and staff may be the most effective way to bring back profit to those businesses that have lost ground

The closure of my two local post offices has made life difficult. I now have to climb into the car, pay to park it and queue up outside what is now my nearest post office with hordes of others. It has turned into an hour's excursion. Now the axe is hanging over this post office, too.

We've got used to the fact that our post doesn't arrive until nearly lunchtime, and now Royal Mail has stopped collecting from boxes on Sundays and bank holidays. How soon before it eradicates collections and deliveries completely, and requires us to go to a central depot to deposit and collect our mail?

Even that's getting difficult—collecting a parcel in my area means parking your car on double yellow lines on a blind bend outside of the collection depot, where you're not allowed to drive in or park. According to the nice man who operates the barrier that stops you getting in, the depot manager is "sick and tired" of hearing about what customers want.

It was never going to be easy to turn round a business losing £1m a day, but the recent stand off between management and unions seems to me to signify something wrong at the heart of the organisation. Trust has been eroded and morale is low because workers take no pride in seeing the postal service being, as one put it recently, "dumbed down".

Businesses are already voting with their feet: Amazon and the Department of Work and Pensions both cancelled contracts with Royal Mail this year.
I wonder if On Leadership, the book by Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton, is a tad hubristic, or just badly timed. Those who want to raise their leadership game might do better to read another new book, Dave Ulrich's Leadership Brand: Developing customer-focused leaders to drive performance and build lasting value.

This volume distils much of Ulrich's thinking about the need to create strong leadership throughout the organisation rather than relying on one individual leader. But, controversially, Ulrich says that leadership is not easily transferable, and that 30 to 40 per cent of what makes a good leader should be tied to the strategy or identity of the organisation.

One of the most compelling descriptions of leadership in action that I have heard recently came from Martyn Phillips, HR director of B&Q, speaking at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) annual conference in September. He said that employee engagement (defined by the CIPD as "a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues") peaked at B&Q 18 months before sales began to dip in mid-2005, after 10 years of growth.

Phillips instituted a concerted corporate initiative to re-engage staff, making every manager, including the board, accountable for driving up the engagement of their team. Managers who didn't make the grade had to shape up, forfeit their bonus or ship out.

The results were dramatic. Despite store closures and redundancies, engagement soared rapidly over the next 18 months. Customer satisfaction and sales rose. When times are difficult, according to Phillips, engagement should go up, not down, because you drop other things to focus on it.

When asked by Today presenter John Humphrys why he had not been talking to staff, Royal Mail chief executive Adam Crozier replied: "Running the company is the most important thing." But, as Humphrys pointed out: "There won't be a company to run if this goes on."

As Leighton knows from his days at Asda, where he established a reputation as Mr Motivator, engagement drives business success. But one observation absent from his book is that leadership is not as transferable as we often assume. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Some question how running Saatchi & Saatchi and the Football Association qualified Crozier to take on the Royal Mail. Will Leighton avoid this criticism?

If the Royal Mail focused more on people than the bottom line, it would find a way of delivering the seven-days-a-week service that today's customers expect, and discover that profits followed.