44: Careers in Support with Mike Redbord

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello, and welcome to episode 44 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is Careers in Support, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Mike Redboard. Mike, the topic for this week is careers in support.

Mike Redbord: 0:39

I I love this topic because if you're anything like me, you never meant to work in support. They kind of just like found themselves doing customer work one day, and I can totally relate with that because that's how my career went too. A lot of people wind up there, and then you sort of ask yourself, like, oh, is this like where I should be? Is this what I ought to be doing? Where could this lead? And I think there's a lot of questions and often unanswered questions around what it means to work in support.

Charlotte Ward: 1:04

Yeah, yeah, I I totally agree. Um, so so what does it mean to you to work in support?

Mike Redbord: 1:08

And so to me, like support and customer work in general is kind of like the liberal arts education of industry, right? And I think that you you see everything. And if you if you work in support, you know what I mean, right? You see the good, you see the bad, you understand the customer, you understand the product, you see how you know that one decision some executive made maybe a few months ago has finally flowed through to the customer experience. And you start, you can kind of pin together all these disparate points of view. And support is like an awesome basis for moving your career anywhere you want. It could be, you know, to double down and spend you know a decade or a career in support, it could be to use it as a bit of a stepping stone, or it could be to you know move into a leadership position because you really love the you know the team around you in addition to the customers in front of you. So I view it as just like this awesome foundation support is. And I think that if more support people even thought like that, I think it would do some real, real good uh for all of us because I think there's a ton of um optimism to be had around the support role.

Charlotte Ward: 2:08

And speaking as someone who has built a career in support like you, I think that it does provide you with such a great opportunity to pull together so many strands and you can really make make of it what you want. I really agree with that. How intentional do you think you can or should be about that?

Mike Redbord: 2:25

This is different for different people, right? And um, you know, when I was running a team of a few hundred folks in support, you'd have some people that from the before they were even hired, they said, I want to be a product manager, and the way that I'm going to get there is I'm gonna do support for X period of time, I'm gonna get these skills. Then you have people like me who just sort of tend to say yes to stuff. And um, and I I think there's a really big spectrum there. So for listeners who are you know sitting in a support job thinking, okay, what does it all mean? I would say look around you for the opportunities and try to create a bit of a map in terms of what the adjacencies are. Like what are the skills that you are developing and what could be a way to build on those?

Charlotte Ward: 3:01

Right, that makes sense. I I think that if you have that laser focus, that's great, right? Because you can in support, you can take a step in almost any direction in the business. I mean, is there a part of the business that you feel you can't get to naturally from support? It feels like any business that's got any element of customer centricity about it can use support folks in most areas, I would think.

Mike Redbord: 3:24

Yeah, as you were asking the question, I was just milling through our. You know, I think there's some that are a little bit more proximate than others, like you know, customer success or something is probably a bit more proximate. And something like finance, maybe a little farther. But as I'm saying that, I can think of two people that uh at HubSpot move from support to FPNA and you know they they spend their days with their noses and spreadsheets. I think that the customer experience and the the knowledge of that can enrich pretty much any role if your company is truly customer-centric. If you're a support person looking to make a move into something that maybe isn't a super close adjacency, is your company the kind of place that values your experience and your knowledge of the customer?

Charlotte Ward: 4:03

As a leader, then how do you manage that outflow of great people into other areas of the business?

Mike Redbord: 4:09

Honestly, this is one of the greatest joys, but also most difficult kind of both emotionally and operationally parts of the job. So you look at your team, you know, and uh you say, wow, I got like these five amazing people that are just like the pillar of the team. In a lot of teams, it's often uh the case that those five pillars, those five best people, are basically going to attrit at some rate. And the question is, as a leader, do I want them to attrit within my organization or do I want them to attrit to somewhere else? I've seen lots of organizations where there's no up or out, it's just out or stuck in support. And that's you know, that really makes me sad because I think there is a better way.

Charlotte Ward: 4:46

Yeah, yeah. So so do you think you need quite a defined structure to be able to build that progression and keep those folks internal to the business, or or do you think it can be more fluid? It feels like it's more necessary in bigger organizations. I mean, even as I'm saying this, I'm kind of answering my own question and I can see you nodding. Do you think it needs to be so formal in small businesses?

Mike Redbord: 5:08

Um, I I think it's very hard to formalize it in small businesses because the business is not predictable when it's small, right? You don't know when your next you know CSM role is going to open up, maybe. And you don't know when your next engine, you know, your next uh entry-level engineering job is going to open up. Um and you know, timing can be poor or something else. And so I find that once a once a support team hits about you know 25 people, that's probably the right time to start to wrap a little bit of structure around it. To ask yourself the question of like, okay, we have these people on the team, if we kind of look at their skills, uh, you know, what what are they good at? And what are their adjacencies and what what is the nature of the organization that I as a leader am building and how can I channel that energy like further on into the business, right? And that could be to double down within support or elsewhere.

Charlotte Ward: 5:54

Yeah, and so you're almost overlaying the the career paths over your existing team and looking at the possibilities based on the people you have rather than trying to force them into boxes.

Mike Redbord: 6:05

Totally. And I think that there's an element of career placement or recruitment that really good support managers have so that when they do have a rep who's like getting pretty senior, how can we build that bridge together? And the manager has the foresight and the tools and the structure to put it together to sort of you know help and elevate that person's career. When that comes together, it's absolutely amazing because it's just a it's a win for the business, it's a win for the for the support person, and frankly, it should be a win for the manager too. That should be like uh you know, kudos to that person, and it's just like a really nice moment when the pieces do actually synthesize like that.

Charlotte Ward: 6:40

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