42: Careers in Support with Natalie Ruhl

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 42 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is career progression in support. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back my very good friend Natalie Rule. Obviously, you've had a long career, a long and distinguished career in support now. An agent. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Have you strategized for that, particularly personally? Did you always see support as the place for you? No. If it wasn't, and I don't think it often is, I think a lot of people end up here by accident and then grow to love it. How do you help your team build careers in support if that seems the natural place for them? And if it's not the natural place for them, what happens next?

Natalie Ruhl: 1:10

Yeah. So to be quite honest with you, no, that wasn't my my ideal career. When I was little, I for my fifth or sixth birthday, I asked for a briefcase and a twin set because I wanted to be a business lady. Um that's what that's what I wanted to be.

Charlotte Ward: 1:26

And very fetching in them you do look, I must say.

Natalie Ruhl: 1:30

Yes. Um, so no, support wasn't my first choice. But very quickly, as an agent, like figured out the things that I was good at and like the ways that success played to my strength. I love solving problems, um, particularly not my own. And I think it's, you know, like it it just started to become a thing that I really, really liked. I left my first role in customer support because I was told, yeah, sorry, no raise, um, and this is as much as we can offer you. And I moved on to something completely different, um, which is online marketing. There I really understood like how transferable skills are really a thing that are massively important in in the workplace these days. Because I am very, very firmly of the belief that if you hire for the right attitude, a lot of skills can be taught, or most of the skills can be taught. So so that's kind of like how my growth happened, and like I kind of amassed a lot of transferable skills and I was incredibly lucky at times as well. I I got given opportunities to like speak in front of people, present things to boards and and CEOs, and and like uh be in a place where you're in an incubator setting and you kind of get to like consult a lot of different companies on like how you could build support and and and what could be done and why you would make these decisions. Not always in hindsight would I say that like my growth path was leading me to become a support leader. But it just turned out that all the things that I really wanted and that I really liked formed in in this role.

Charlotte Ward: 3:15

Yeah.

Natalie Ruhl: 3:16

Um, and so do I think that like if I would were to describe my absolute dream job that I would say it is a leader of support? Probably not. But by the kind of tasks and responsibilities that I would lie out, it kind of would make people think that that's probably in operations or in support. But it's not so much to me tied to a title, but more of like what can I do or what is my remit in a certain role, what is my impact that I can have.

Charlotte Ward: 3:44

You're right, it's it's as much about just identifying the things you want to do and and moulding those into a set of responsibilities that you can work on.

Natalie Ruhl: 3:55

And that they are not finite or set in a cage, you know, having a certain skill does not limit you. Well, you know, now I don't know, you can up you can operate, you have to be a doctor. That's not that's not how yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 4:10

I'm I I don't want somebody who wants to be a brain surgeon fixing my brain. I I want a brain surgeon. But um, in terms of this kind of picking the apples off the tree that you you like the look of and being willing to carry them for a while, I don't know, I I don't know how far I can run with this analogy, but take the apples home and polish a fruit bowl for them, yeah.

Natalie Ruhl: 4:31

You know, maybe you make them into an apple pie because that that was just what what worked. Um, you know, what I will take from this analogy is is oftentimes what you make of it or the opportunities you take from something. You know, in the role that I'm in, things were thrown at me that completely caught me by surprise very early on. And the way I would say have optimized support was not always an idealistic one, but sometimes a necessity-based one that has shown me a lot of like different things that I didn't think I could do that that I had to do. But on the other, on the other hand, it is what you make of it, and someone else in this role would have probably done something completely different. And that and it wouldn't wouldn't have been right or wrong, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 5:17

They'd have lemon drizzle cake instead of apples, right? Exactly. And and you know, it's about it's about taking responsibility as well, but it's also about putting yourself in the places where you're gonna find apples. I mean, you're not gonna, you know, you if you want to make an apple pie, you have you have to get apples, right? So um there is no point in sitting on the sofa at home saying, I really want apple pie.

Natalie Ruhl: 5:42

You know, I mean you're not going to go out and and actually either get some or make some.

Charlotte Ward: 5:47

Exactly.

Natalie Ruhl: 5:48

There is, and and that again is like there isn't always just one way. You can buy apples and flour and sugar and butter and just do it yourself. Or you can just, you know, there's a nice person that bakes pie next door, you can just buy some from there. Like Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 6:04

You don't have to build everything from scratch either. There's plenty of uh there are plenty of resources available to you either. Absolutely, absolutely. If you if you're gonna bake an apple pie truly from scratch, you first have to invent the universal. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. I'm gonna stop talking about apples now because I think we've run out of steam on the apple analogy. Thank you so much. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash forty-two for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.