21: Moving from Doing to Leading the Work with Ash Rhodes

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome back to the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. This is episode 21. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week we're talking about moving from doing the work to leading the work. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Ash Rhodes. Now, this session is quite short because we started talking about this and then the conversation became very interesting, and I decided to move the second part of that to a whole other week. So look out for that later in the run. But for now, let's get straight into this. Please welcome back Ash. What's your strategy for getting out of the queue? You know, from we all talk about this, moving from doing the work to leading the work. Do you think it ever truly happens? And should it happen? If so, when should it happen?

Ash Rhodes: 1:04

I don't think it should ever fully happen. Like I I am a big believer in at least a little bit keeping yourself in the queue forever. And in fact, I think you should increase other people's participation in the queue as much as possible. By other people sorry, by other people you mean other departments, other people as many people, as many people in your org as possible. In support driven, there is a lot of automaticians, people from automatic. And there is particularly a fellow named Andrew Spittle, who was my boss over at Automatic. One of the things that he was good about was maintaining a practice that Automatic has had since time immemorial, which is the support week. Support week was that every person that first came on, but then throughout the year, every person through their career um had to spend a each year had to spend a week doing customer support. It is by far the best. Like every person who did that would have such greater empathy for customer support. Absolutely, but also for the customer in general, for the customer plight. Weirdly, developers all of a sudden went from being like, whatever, the customer can do what we say, to being like, yeah, the customer totally needs this. We definitely need to change this flow or what have you. Because when you are not dealing directly with the customer, uh answering their questions, uh seeing things from their point of view, you forget, you forget why we do these things. And so that's why I think we should always be doing cue work and why we think other people should why I think other people should be doing it as as much as you can. Getting everybody in is a pipe dream, but but yeah, that's um that's my thing.

Charlotte Ward: 3:16

Um so the guy, the guys at Automatic, you said, refresh that every year. Everyone in the company steps in for another week every year in their tenure at Automatic, right? I think other companies do this kind of thing as well on various cadences, right? They they attempt all hands support one way or another. Um far from every company. But I think it's something we hear and more we hear more and more about. Um my question, therefore, is you said before that you would see developers move from a very engineering-centric viewpoint to a very customer-centric viewpoint after that experience. Do you think that that refreshing every year is needed? Or do you think that they do you think there is a tendency for other parts of the business to slip back to known ways and that that refresher is necessary? Yeah.

Ash Rhodes: 4:10

Absolutely. I do think that it is uh very much a um I think it's human nature. You fall back into your own um tried and true not even tried and true. I think you just, with distance, you tend to forget.

Charlotte Ward: 4:29

That's where we leave, Ash, for today. Come back later in the run to see where this conversation went next as we start talking about looking beyond the numbers. In the meantime, I'd just like to thank you for staying on this journey with me and with the rest of the leaders who have given so generously of their time. If you have any particular questions or comments you'd like to share with us, then please do get in touch. You can email me directly at Charlotte at customersupportleaders.com or go to customersupportleaders.com where you'll find all sorts of options to share and support. If there's anything in particular you'd like me to cover in future episodes, that's the place to drop me a line. I'd really love to hear from you, so please get in touch. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash twenty one. That's where you'll find the show notes. Talk to you next time.