161: Year in Review: Growing Teams and Leaders

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 161 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. As we look towards the new year, you may well be wondering about the future of your team and the individuals in your team and the growth of your team over the next 12 months. Think of all that energy you and your organization spend on new hires, of all that investment of time and expertise to get the right person for the job. Some days or weeks or even months after they first applied, you're both ready to start working together. How do you ensure that this relationship is a successful one? How do you ensure their success within the organization? How do you ensure they feel successful and want to stay? The key to that success and that perception of success is ensuring that people who join your team are onboarded in just the right way. It's actually not as hard as it seems. Here's my bulletproof 12-point plan for great onboarding. Number one, have a plan. Do I need to say this? If you haven't already figured out your plan, use this one. Number two, make the onboarding plan visible to the team and the new hire. Have an accessible checklist which everyone can see that shows the relevant stage that that person is at. Everyone then will have a clear understanding both of where they are and what's next. There'll be no unwelcome surprises for anyone, including you or your new hire. Number three, be ready when they arrive. Have their logins and equipment set up. Having your new team member idle because you were too busy or disorganized or whatever to prep for their arrival just leaves a bad taste in their mouth. They'll be unproductive and isolated and inert really until you can get them up and running with the basics. Have all their logins, access cards, equipment ready for day one. Set them up for success. Have someone expecting their arrival ready to greet them and get them settled. This is doubly true if your hire is a remote one. Number four, as I just mentioned, have a buddy system. Having a buddy who isn't a trainer or a leader, particularly in larger teams where new hires can potentially feel a little lost, and you are likely to be stretched more thinly. Having a buddy who isn't a trainer or a leader really helps alleviate the stress levels your newbie feels when they encounter the inevitable silly question and don't want to bother the busy people. Introduce them early to a peer who has the bandwidth to field every single query. Number five, introduce them for goodness sake. Take the time to introduce them to a good number of people early on. That means the people at neighbouring desks, the people who they'll talk to are often in the early days, and the people in the Slack channels you expect them to be most active in at the start. Even the most extrovert of hires will struggle if left to their own devices, in an office of strangers wearing headphones, or sat at home alone with a bewildering array of Slack channels and no one to talk to. Number six, have them introduce themselves. You might consider giving them specific and personal airtime on teen calls or all hands meetings and so on, if you can find the appropriate forum. They could introduce themselves maybe using a personal map or their new role, whatever works. Number seven, help them learn about the company and the product. Regardless of their industry knowledge or pre-interview research, this person is still new to your company. Give them space to learn about the structure and culture in a deeper way than they could gather from outside the walls. New people don't have the historical context of the product, so you need documentation and careful onboarding there too. Number eight, break the plan down into stages. Structure your onboarding program in obvious steps. If your ramp up time is typically a few days, then have daily stages, similarly for weeks. Giving your hire clear expectations in the early days helps them feel the progress and allows them to self-check regularly. An alternative approach which I personally really like is not checkpointing by day or by week or by any time interval, but checkpointing by knowledge steps. So having chunks of work that make sense, breaking down the work into tasks or groups of tasks or responsibilities with a clear path from one to the next. This is particularly useful if you can systemize it in a in a checklist or in a JIRA board or something like that, where a remote employee particularly can really self-drive it and take responsibility for their own onboarding as much as possible. Number nine, set expectations at each of those stages. Make sure early expectations are very clear in terms of success. Build in moments of pride, define clear stages to reach, and build in opportunities to succeed and celebrate that success. Early firsts are important. Number 10, have regular feedback loops. Even with the ability to self-check or self-drive, be sure to build in some regular feedback loops with leadership or with the team lead, mentor, or buddy. This check and reflect time is key to establishing more formally whether things seem on track or not. There should be no guesswork in the progress checks. Number 11. Have clear responsibility matrices. Have a responsibility matrix set up so it's clear who is doing what during the whole onboarding process. Then there's no reason to assume that someone else set up a login that you were supposed to sort out. Or you doing a second round of introductions that have already been done. It keeps it efficient. Number twelve, have an FAQ. When that buddy isn't around, who else might answer the who do I talk to about XYZ type questions? Have an FAQ for your new hire. It gives them another opportunity to solve their own problems before reaching out and bothering someone else. And there you have it, that's twelve steps. Your new hire is ready to run and feeling thoroughly integrated to the team too. Lucky you. Earlier in the year I talked to some other leaders on the podcast about onboarding new hires, building teams, retaining talent, and building new leaders in our teams. Listen to those words of wisdom now.

Lauren Eimers: 7:42

We have um definitely found, I think, kind of the sweet spot in um building a foundation of knowledge about our tool, um, experience with that tool, and then having a senior support individual to help walk them through the process. And the onboarding, I feel like onboarding really it happens honestly over the course of a month or two months. And then it's again that iteration process thereafter, where we try to create a safe space where questions are always okay and it's always okay to reach out to another teammate or a lead to make sure we're all on the same track. And I think, especially working remotely, it's so easy for someone to get off kind of on a wrong track and just keep chugging along until if there aren't any safeguards in place to guard against that to help redirect that, you know, there can be a lot of miscommunication occurring, not only between teammates, but also between the customer support individual and their customers.

Charlotte Ward: 8:44

I think for me, the biggest challenge I find here is particularly when you're pretty small and you're growing, is figuring out how to make this kind of a repeatable process. Because onboarding is something that we don't do that often when we're small, and it requires significant effort, right? So talk to me about that.

Ash Rhodes: 9:06

First, the the repeatability thing. You're right. We especially when you're small, it's something that you um you do so rarely that you kind of lose your mojo. In cases like this, lists are your friends. Um, you create a list for when you have hired someone at immediately post-hire, this is all the things you need to do. A week before they start, this is what you need to do. Um, first day, these are the topics that you need to cover, so on and so forth. Afterwards, even better, if you are at the point where like your level of like pseudo-ocd, uh you can get them to fill out some sort of CSAT, uh uh saying, okay, this is what went smoothly, this is what where I got lost, etc. Um, I've had friends who did it every single day. Like where what what went well, what are you still uh hazy on to know what they needed to go back over the next day. I I am not there. Like I I I'm much more seat of your pants as far as training goes. But that's that's really what it comes down to is lists. And I'm not even that much of a uh a list person. However, I find that if I don't create those lists, if I'm not super on top of it, then something major is going to be missed. A policy uh is going to be forgotten, a tool will not be explained, something along those lines, you're in trouble.

Craig Stoss: 10:44

Yeah, onboarding is is a mixed bag. Um I've had a bit of uh turnover in my career in the past few years, and so I've been onboarded in multiple different companies with multiple different uh ways. And I think that it's very interesting to see the different mentalities. You know, you have some companies whose version of onboarding is sit in a room with someone from HR, someone from IT, someone from development, someone from your product team, you know, and they just talk a little bit about themselves, or you set your laptop up or whatever it might be. And then there's then there's my most recent experience where, you know, the focus was really on providing the full context and perspective around an organization. And I think that it became so useful as we dove into the specifics because understanding why a company exists, understanding what each department and and service line provide to the business, and just the general context about why I would talk to this department about these topics that impact me was very useful. What I really found intriguing was that they really took the time to see how support fit into the flow and the process of the company, why support was important, kind of the whole flow for the customer experience in the sense of how did a case come in? You know, what are the channels we offer? Um, it was really, really that perspective that shone on it rather than, you know, here's a support department and here's the leader of the support department telling you what they do.

Kaylin Bailey: 12:14

One of the first things that I've learned through a few years of onboarding is when building out the onboarding calendar to leave some room in there for when you do a review at the end of the day and they say, Hey, I didn't understand this subject and I want to come back to it. That that happens a lot and we didn't have it built in to where the review sometimes happened, you know, weeks after they did the follow-up. But if you have it built into your schedule, you can go in the next day, make sure they feel confident on it, which will help them learn the next item on the agenda.

Ackerman: 12:45

So one of the things that was really interesting at one of my jobs was they set out in advance, they sent me an email and they said, Here's uh what you can expect from today. Here are the hours that you're gonna be working. We will provide lunch on the first day. This is the type of attire we wear because it was it was in an office. So they were helping me feel comfortable walking into the building first day, so I knew what to expect. And that would that just eased my nerves a lot. And I've tried to employ that in in the onboarding I've done with with employees that I've hired. So again, make your people feel comfortable, let them know what to expect, especially on the first day. Give them a structure, but also have some flexibility in that. Some people can go hard for eight hours, some people need a 10-minute break every now and again.

Meredith Molloy: 13:28

I think that it is sometimes a stereotype, or maybe not so sometimes. Maybe it just is a stereotype that customer support is an industry and a business where if you're an individual contributor, that sort of is all that it is. And I always think that's such a shame for that stereotype to be out there because there is so much that anyone with a support background can do. And I think one of the many paths that someone can take is to transition towards leadership roles within within support. And I think that there's always that handful of the one or two people on your team that you're just like, this career path is actually for you. Like this, this is your thing, which is always those are like, I always like call them like the unicorns. Like in my mind, like those are the unicorns. How do you spot them? How do you spot a unicorn? Aside from, you know, like really, really like pretty hair and like a unicorn of the horn. Yeah.

Ash Rhodes: 14:36

Those are the people who just have kind of a sense of selflessness that is required for leadership. Anybody who is really, really jumping to be a leader, uh, no matter what, you you want to be a little bit afraid of, not afraid of cautious, you want to you want to be cautious about because you do want to keep your eyes open for people who want to be a leader for the wrong reasons. Whether it's because they don't like doing day-to-day work, they they only see you not in the queue. They only see you in meetings, and so they think meetings aren't hard, or they only see projects and they think projects aren't hard.

Charlotte Ward: 15:14

She draws a parallel with motherhood, which I can relate to, but I think the same is true of bringing leaders out in our team. And that is that it's our job to edge our fledglings along along the branch from the nest and slightly push them off.

Josh Magsam: 15:38

You have to give them some latitude so they can make those decisions, support them in making difficult calls. Um, I can think of an instance where a more junior manager that I was working with at the time was hiring, and it was a new position, it was kind of a unique position. And, you know, we had some back and forth about what would bring success to this position. And I was pretty skeptical about the decision they were leaning towards, but they were very fierce in advocating for their position. The risk was fairly minimal, not zero, but minimal. You know, I conferred with other stakeholders and I said, I think we need to let them own this call, right? I think we need to let them decide on this hire, make it very clear, you know, what the success criteria are going to be, you know, then then watch and be ready to jump in and say, kudos, you made a great call. We were wrong, you taught us something. But if they fail, also be ready to step in and say, everyone does it, it's all right. And, you know, now we're going to iterate and move on. And the next time you screen for this position, you're going to know a little bit more of what to look for.

Ryan Klausner: 16:38

I guarantee you there are several folks within your existing team who want to level up their experience and likely step into a leadership opportunity or advance their career in some capacity, but with usually rare exception, some form of leadership is part of that. I think that there's several ways of obviously approaching this, but what I have enjoyed doing and have had some success historically is making sure that I have a close rapport with my team. So, you know, aside from weekly one-on-ones with team members having some sort of quarterly review in terms of their own professional development, where do they want to go in a candid way? And I think it's really important not to keep that scope within your existing team or department. I think the biggest fear and concern we can have is to stifle our team in terms of their own professional growth. When we hire people, we should want to hire folks that are more experienced than us in certain regards, or bringing something new to the organization and something new to the team that will challenge our existing ideas, challenge our existing process, and ultimately we're going to be a stronger organization because of it.

Greg Skirving: 17:51

I think um having uh an actual team lead or even a de facto leader within the individual contributor group is uh is uh critical to the success of the overall organization. And it's a tough role. It's tough to be a pseudo-manager and yet still be one of the folks that's uh that's that's doing the doing the job, taking cases, dealing with customers. So it uh takes a very special, very special person. I find that uh um leaders naturally um um bubble up. You'll notice them over time. They they get the respect of of their peers. Um they typically have a long line at their desk with uh looking for uh looking for help. And it's not just the technical part, the core part of the job. Um, it may be dealing with customers, it may be uh other administrative parts of the role. Um, you know, you see that over time. What I like to do when I have uh people that that are in that position um and want to really uh embrace that and move forward is uh provide opportunities for challenge. Uh um, you know, have them cover for me when I'm uh when I'm out. Um uh in my role, obviously I fill a role, but when Greg's out, the role doesn't leave. So who's Greg when Greg's not here? And uh great opportunity to have people actually get in the saddle and and and see what it's like.

Charlotte Ward: 19:19

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one six one for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.