196: Managing Change with Lauren Fearn

Charlotte Ward: 0:12

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and ninety-six of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is managing change. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Lauren Fern from Zapia. Lauren, it's lovely to have you back. And this week was a topic that you brought to me. It actually came out of a discussion that we were having way back when we were talking about managing change on one of the panels. And we kind of almost got completely off on a tangent, didn't we? Which I had to I had to rein in. But it was it was a super fascinating topic. And uh and I'm so glad you came back to talk to us, talk to me about this because this idea that we were that we started talking about back then of can of the importance of like continual development in your team, I think is one that you had some really interesting thoughts on. I'm so glad you came back to talk about it.

Lauren Fearn: 1:19

Yeah, thanks for having me back.

Charlotte Ward: 1:22

So I don't know if we can pick up from where we were all those weeks ago, and maybe let's for the for the benefit of the uh of the of our listeners now who weren't necessarily listening to the panel back then. Let's just try and recap this. So we we were talking about managing change, and at the time we were talking about how um a lot of organizations, when they are like maybe going through an acquisition, the acquisition will happen. There's clearly going to be a lot of change, and one of the first things that you see is a rollout of some change management training, right? And I think that was what prompted our discussion about the importance of doing this more continually, wasn't it?

Lauren Fearn: 2:01

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And just not leaving it until the point of no, kind of the point of no return, really. Um it should be a thing that is part of your strategy of your team, I think.

Charlotte Ward: 2:13

So so how how do you make it so then? And I mean, maybe if you can tell us what you're doing right now, that that would be a great start.

Lauren Fearn: 2:20

Yeah, so um so there's a few different things really, but the the the biggest thing that's been um great for this for my team really has been um starting out with the team lead. So the way that we identify team leads is we um we always try and promote team leads from within Zapia. So it's very rare that we hire externally for team leads, and essentially what we say is you don't have to be um super keen on management forever, but we ask you to commit to at least a year. So that helps people get in the door of leadership, and then we can really help them grow their skills. Um, when we get to that point, um there's some very sort of basic training that that we have put together as just a support team. So we have L and D that have amazing resources for leadership and everything like that, but we have some that are more specific to support. So some of those are like giving feedback, setting goals, context switching, um, time management and prioritization and objectivity as well. And so we kind of have like key skills, stage two and stage three, and those key skills are things that we ask people to really focus on within the first few months because they're key skills. Obviously, everyone should be able to um you know understand those skills really well and hone them. Um, and then when people have kind of got that down, then we start to move into stage two, which is kind of things like effective decision making, um, delegation and reprioritization, and disagreeing commit are the three really big things that kind of come out of this stage because when you become a team lead and you've suddenly got a peer group of other managers and team leads, um, you know, you'll start it's a really exciting time and you're having really good conversations, but you it's not until you really get in the weeds that you start realizing that sometimes you're not going to agree, sometimes you're gonna have to delegate, reprioritize all of those things as well. Um, and then the next stage after that, so this is something that we sort of identify probably about a year into leadership, junior management, whatever you want to call it, and that's really about strategic thinking and problem solving and being able to kind of work with um maybe the executive team or C-suite and starting to speak to those higher-ups about you know, pitching ideas or talking about budgets and things like that. So that's one thing that we've tried to, you know, make sure that we're constantly doing with the new team leads, um, and keeping those what we deem to be key skills, stage two and stage three, really consistent. So everybody's growing those same skills, and then we're like honing into the specific areas for specific people.

Charlotte Ward: 4:56

Yeah, that's that's really great because you don't just have a single management course. Yeah, you're you're really focusing on this skill by skill, and there is a real kind of programmatic sense to it and a real purpose and intention around it, and and I guess that also allows it to move at the pace of the individual as well.

Lauren Fearn: 5:16

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's some folks who are really, really invested in in people management, so they want to know everything and they're super fast learners, or there's some folks who um, you know, it might not come as naturally, and that's okay, and we really want to give people the space to um identify the skills that we deem to be important and then be able to work on them with their manager in in a time that suits them. Um, you know, we try and keep a rough timeline of how long we think it might take, um, but we know that everybody learns at a different pace. It's really important, you know, for for longevity and for people to really understand these skills to not force it to happen within two weeks or whatever, or get a course done, you know, read all these lesson leads in a week or something like that. You know, that that can be quite intimidating. Like learn all of this stuff, and now you have these skills. Um, we want to drag it out a little bit.

Charlotte Ward: 6:06

Yeah, yeah, give you a chance to to practice and hone them, as you say. Yeah. Um, and and this is everything you've described there is really specific to the support team, though. I mean, you you said this was like a support management program, and uh how how how does that differ from the the wider L and D that you have available at Zapia then? Because I assume Zapia has similar leadership skill um type training.

Lauren Fearn: 6:33

Yeah, so the L and D team provides um like really fantastic training around um managing difficult conversations, having one-on-ones, which are all kind of sort of standardized across you know every single team. And the reason why I wanted to do something that was slightly more specific to support is because I think that um generally support teams you know in businesses can be bigger teams, so there's a lot more people management things involved. You have really good examples that that you know can you can provide training on. Uh there's five managers and six team leads in within the support team at Zapia, and they have so much experience and so many things to share that we can say these are quite specific to support. Um, you know, here they are in the training, so you can start to see those real-world examples. So, to be honest, it's probably not um necessarily a support-specific thing, but I would encourage very specific managers to have their own programs around leadership because leadership skills are pretty standard, but there's things that come up a lot within my team specifically, you know, around disagreeing commit, because when you're trying to make a decision and there's 12 of you, um, you know, it's it's hard to make sure everybody's happy all the time. So those are the skills that are important to to this specific team, I would say.

Charlotte Ward: 7:50

Yeah, yeah, you you're you're very right, actually, that support teams are quite often among the largest in in um a lot of organizations. And uh and also because they're so very operational and so very process-driven. And and there is there are people involved at every stage. There are very few stages in any part of the support life cycle where it's just one person and a laptop and nothing else. So um, so I I think that's really interesting that you found the that all of those factors actually are really good and good reasons for having your own um your own program. And actually the the amount of uh the the granularity that you've been able to give to it actually, I think just goes to show that there is there is a lot there to work with. Yeah.

Lauren Fearn: 8:44

And one of the things that um we had uh I can't remember what the workshop was specifically, but People Ops shared this analogy the other day, which I'm gonna share, and I'm probably gonna butcher it, so um bear with me. But what we were kind of talking about was that um if you think about it, uh each business is kind of like a big brand like Subway. So Subway is like a big brand, and they instead of having like multiple most all of their stores are franchisees. So what we were kind of talking about was People Ox are kind of like the head office, kind of like Subway, and then the teams within the business are kind of the franchisees. Franchise, is that how you say it?

Charlotte Ward: 9:21

Yeah, franchise. Let's go with it anyway.

Lauren Fearn: 9:24

Yeah, um, and that was really interesting because we obviously have standard training around management and all sorts of things, but it was nice to to kind of hear that analogy because it was sort of like here are some standard things, but also you're responsible for your own team, so you're responsible for the growth and all those things as well. Um, so yeah, I just think it's super important to be able to tailor your training, especially especially around management, to to what it is that you're focusing on.

Charlotte Ward: 9:53

Yeah, I really like that analogy as well. I think that uh it's it's it is as you say, it's a set of standard tools that you're given, and then you can be really specific. So you know you can decide how you want cars in your particular takeaway car park to park or whatever, right? Yeah, let's but let's butcher it some more. No, that's awesome. Thanks so much, Lauren. Thank you. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one nine six for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.