Episode 05 | The Essential Mindset Shifts of Successful Leadership

Hey, cs Psychos. In today's episode, I'm going to share how your mindset affects your results as a CS leader, from the tasks you focus on to the beliefs you have about yourself. That's all coming up next right here on Psychology of Customer Success, stay tuned. Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do. So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provan CS Leadership Coach, award-winning CS strategist and certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership and mindset, using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success, where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics and executive presence. We'll dig into subjects like the helper personality, how thought errors like it's just easier if I do it keep your department stuck in reactive mode, and how cognitive bias can really screw up your customer journey. Plus much more. Make sure to subscribe on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon, and here's to your success. Welcome back. Today we're talking about one of my favorite topics, mindset, so probably help if I explain what I mean by mindset. So mindset is a set of beliefs that shapes how you make sense of the world and yourself. So the way that this happens is it tends to be a thought that you keep thinking over and over so much that it goes on autopilot. As you're growing up, as your brain is developing, you create these things called schemas, and those are basically, if you think of an architectural drawing, it's basically what your entire frame of the world is built on. So it's consistencies. It's like mom always comes into my room. That's consistent. And food makes me feel full. That's consistent. It's light in the morning and dark at night. These are things that we see enough times that we say, okay, this is that. If this, then that Things that we are convinced are true. Now the interesting thing is, humans really love to believe that they've got a lot figured out, and the fact is there are plenty of facts out there, but we don't tend to think in facts. We think in thoughts, and thoughts are perspectives right? So let's say I was looking for a job right now looking for a CS job. I know a lot of people are. I could say you know, some people feel like, oh my God, there are no jobs out there. Well, that's not a fact. You can go on LinkedIn and see it. It can certainly feel that way, but you can go on LinkedIn and see that there are thousands of open positions. So then the question becomes okay, well then, is the problem me? And you start beating yourself up and saying I'm the problem. Now, not to get all tail or swift on you Now. The issue there is that that's not a fact either, but it's something that it's very easy to take on as a belief. And when you have a particular belief, you're going to act based on what you thought right. So if you're thinking I'm the problem, I can't get a job, this is terrible. You're probably not going to be your best self, you're probably not going to be showing up to interviews very well. You might not even fill out as many applications because you just feel burnt out and miserable. And what's the point anyway? These are ways in which your mindset, what you're thinking, actually ends up influencing your behavior and making your outcomes worse. So, because if you've been a CSM and you've moved into a leadership role. Those are very different roles and they require very different mindsets. And since mindset tends to be something that comes from a set of beliefs and things that you focus on the fact that they're very different, it just means you need to call that, you know, we need to call it out and say, all right, you've been focusing on these things over here. Now you have to not only act differently but think differently. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. So what I see and it's causing a huge problem with a lot of new leaders, and so I'm not even that new is that they still come from a CSM mindset rather than a leadership mindset. And whether you want to say it's CSM or individual contributor versus management, however, you want to categorize that. That's sort of the discrepancy here. So what is a CSM mindset? Csm work is task oriented. You know, yes, there's strategy, but you're not trying to coordinate people on your team together as much. There's not as much psychology to it as there is leadership. There's plenty of psychology in CS, but it still comes down to you can execute what you want to do. It's on you to get it done, it's not on you're influencing somebody else you can email the customer and get it done. Another part of it is that a lot of times, most CSMs don't feel like they have the power to say no to internal requests and maybe they'll tell their boss, maybe they won't, but this is one of the reasons that CS can become a dumping ground where sales goes and calls a CSM in and says, hey, I want you to do this demo for me. Oh, but you're so much better at it. You know, csms don't always know what they can say yes to, what they can say no to, so they're not used to it and it doesn't feel safe. And you know someone else is managing your work, your workload. Somebody else is saying, all right, that's it. He or she can't take any more, they've got enough. They're the one kind of saying no on your behalf, hopefully. And the other part of it is, even though you're interacting with customers a lot and it feels like that would translate it's very different interacting with customers versus interacting with internal stakeholders and understanding what they want and helping meet their needs along with meeting the customer's needs as well, and especially when you're now one step back from the customer, it just gets very tricky to balance those things and you do tend to be used to being quote unquote on the customer's side. Now, the truth is, if the customer side and your company side are two different things, you have a major problem. But as a leader, you do need to learn to balance the needs of the client with the needs of your company. You know, and oftentimes it doesn't have to be a black or white decision, but you might not always be able to get the customer what they want as fast as they want. So how do you know? If you've been doing some of this stuff? If you're stuck in the CSM mindset, most likely you would be really into a lot of the customer business trying to get your CSMs to tell you what's going on with every single account, what's their strategy on every single account, maybe listening to their calls, maybe checking their emails, but just being really trying to be really on top of every single account and guiding them on every. You know every aspect of what they should be doing. Being in the weeds, you know, continuing to work with customers, continuing to be bogged down in the details of the day to day rather than okay, what's my plan to get us where we want to be a year from now versus how do I put out this fire today. You know, how do I dig us out from the hole that we're in, what's going to move us forward, what's my vision for the future and how am I acting to get us there. You know a lot of CS leaders say yes to everything because they want to be a team player and they don't realize that part of your job in leadership is to say no. And the higher up the chain you go, the more you have to say no. You know you get to the C-suite, you're saying no 80% of the time or the company would run out of money. So it's learning how to say no, how to say no to people in a way that shows them that, yes, your project is still very important, and acknowledging that and respecting that while still being able to prioritize your own work and saying like, I can't accommodate that right now. You know there's currently too much on my plate. You know I have to get this result, but keep me posted on that. There is no major penalty for not being able to take on someone else's work. Collaboration is important, but it needs to match up with the OKRs of the company and it should never jump in front of your own work, because I see this happens a lot. You know the leadership team will say, oh, but we need your help on this. It's customer facing. We need you to be a team player on this. You know, yeah, put all that other stuff on the back burner, it's fine, it can wait. You know, help this other team with this thing. But what happens there is the other team ends up getting the credit for the metrics and you know, six months go by and the executive leadership team is saying, well, why haven't you moved the needle? And it's like well, because you had me working on 15 different projects that you said were more important. But when you're working on all those different projects, you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. So you have to keep that laser focus and not be outwardly focused on trying to please other people and be just the best worker they've ever had, the best CS leader. How did they ever get along without you? It's very tempting, but you have to sort of be able to hold that vision in your head and stay true to it and just keep chipping away at it. It's not to say like I refuse to talk to anyone else, any other departments by any means, but it's making sure that you have time carved out for yourself to work at work on your KPIs. So instead, one thing I want you to focus on is if this sounds a little bit confusing we really want to think about who before how. Everybody comes in there like I want all the strategies. Give me all the strategies, tell me what to do to figure out my perfect CS strategy and nail retention and then I can start upselling, which is what my company really wants, because they don't realize that retention really matters. And when I say who before how, I could give the best CS strategy in the world, like a custom CS strategy, to the head of engineering at a company and he or she would not be able to execute it. It would fail because they don't have the context. They don't have the competence and the knowledge and the confidence to be able to coordinate all the things and get the buy-in they would need. Without all of that context and I could give it to my eight-year-old he knows quite a lot about customer success now, actually from listening to me prattle on for years but he wouldn't be able to execute it either. He doesn't have the authority. So there are a lot of things that are sort of intangible, that can really stand in your way if you don't take the time to notice them and work on them. Unfortunately, mindset is something that is not going to change overnight. I can't give you the perfect mindset exercise that will make you think like a leader now, forever and ever. Amen, I wish. But it's important to spend some time thinking about. You know, who does this role need me to be? Who does my team need me to be? And typically that's gonna be someone who can prioritize, someone who has boundaries kind boundaries, I call them. Someone who coaches rather than tells people what to do, someone who delegates rather than trying to do absolutely everything themselves. I always like to think of the idea of an orchestra conductor making beautiful music versus a one man band hopping up and down, trying to play all the instruments at once. It's exhausting and it looks ridiculous, whereas if you delegate, if you play to people's strengths and you don't try to be the entire CS department but rather lead them and guide them towards best practices, that's actually gonna take you farther. I know it's scary to delegate the other thing you're gonna wanna focus on. You gotta let go of some of that perfectionism which I know is so hard. Part of it's what that is part of one of the things that got you there. It's probably one of the things that got you there hard work, perfectionism. But once you get to a leadership role, it really starts to become about continuous improvement. So start at 80%, slap something together and see how it works. You can't be focusing on the embroider, on the lifesaver, as I like to call it. You have to focus on minimum viable product which the way product does. Is this going to help? And if it's going to help someone or the company or the clients, what right do I have to hold on to it and not give that to them? Just because I don't want anyone saying anything negative about me. You're gonna get so much farther if you just start just try things and screw up and say okay, now I know that I'm going to turn in this direction based on this data point. I know that's terrifying and it's easy for me to say, but I've also lived it. If it helps you, it's okay to talk to whoever your boss is and say different companies act different ways. Do I have authority here to experiment, to try things on a small scale and see if they work and tweak and adjust things, and 99% of the time you're gonna get a yes, because that's what makes progress. That's why there's agile methodology. It's like, all right, let's just work on this small thing, do the best we can with it in two weeks and then see where we are Now. I don't love that for CS as a method of working the agile method but I do think the overall idea of letting go of that perfectionism, letting it be what I call fast, messy action, is what one of my coaches always called it, and it was very hard for me to adopt. But you know what? I was able to help so many more people so much more quickly than if I were worried about, if all my slides were perfect or if I even had slides. I would rather get the information out there and improve things later. And that's a huge mind shift I had to make. Because, oh my God, what if somebody says something? What if they say it's not good enough? Is everyone gonna think that I'm not good enough? Or are they gonna realize that I don't belong here and I don't know what I'm doing and then no one's ever gonna hire me again and I'm not gonna be able to afford the rent on my apartment. I'm gonna end up living under a bridge. And, oh my God, what about my children? Right? Does it sometimes go like that? Just me, somehow? I doubt it. We tend to take things and take them out the furthest possible scenario in the negative direction. And again, that's our brain. Our brains focus on the negative. That's their default. They're trying to keep us from getting eaten by lions. God bless them it's gotten us this far. But you have to understand. To function at an optimal level at work, you're gonna try to have to focus on the good and not just what is the worst thing that could happen. How about? In that same breath, you also ask yourself what's the best thing that could happen? When's the last time that you considered that? And then ask yourself, of those two scenarios, how likely is each of those to happen? You know, when you start to think about it, if you have to put it down on paper or say it out loud, all of a sudden it feels kind of ridiculous, right, like it feels ridiculous that I said all that out loud. But whenever I've talked one to one with someone and gave them that whole you know living under a bridge scenario. They have chuckled in recognition because we all do this. So even just rating it on a scale of one to 10, like, how much do I feel this is true? And then, on a scale of one to 10, what is the likelihood of this actually happening? You know, scale of one to 10. There's also a great resource called, oh sure, the Burns Triple Column Technique and it includes a lot of information about thought distortions. You know the way that our thoughts can be wrong and confuse us and make us feel really negative about things that really aren't. You know, like in that situation where you know my slides aren't pretty or I don't have slides, so what? That's the only fact of the situation that I didn't include slides. Everything was fine. But really, slides living under a bridge probably not going to happen. One is probably not going to cause the other, and you know, if your brain goes on that kind of spiral like mine does, just try writing down what you think is going to happen. It acts kind of like a flashlight under the bed when they're scared of monsters. All of a sudden they see that what they thought were monsters are just socks, a stuffed animal. It's nothing scary, it's actually quite mundane and just like that. When you're trying to do a presentation for the first time in front of a big group or you know having to present in all hands or talk to the C-suite for the first time, it's all pretty mundane. They are not confused about how much you know. You got here on your merits, you didn't trick anyone. They've seen your resume, they've seen your background or you got promoted. They know what they're getting and that you might not have every single thing figured out yet, and that's okay. Don't necessarily say that you know something if you don't, but you're not going to get fired for saying you know what. That's a good question. I'm going to look into that and get right back to you. Works like a charm. So some other things that can really help with your confidence is you need to be able to ask yourself can I say no to this? Can somebody else do this just as well? What would happen if I put something out there and it's not perfect? You know what are the real consequences that you know how. How imperfect would it have to be for there to be consequences? What part of it has to be right to ensure that it will achieve the desired outcome? Because that's what we're all about, right, we want to be able to get the result. Always focus on the result and the rest will come. It's very easy to tell people to be more confident. The fact is, confidence comes from action. You know action breeds confidence. You're never going to be ready. You're never going to not be scared and be ready to try something that's scaring you. You just have to act. You have to do it scared. That's what bravery really is. It's not people who aren't afraid in scary situations, it's people who are afraid and do it anyway. So you can't be brave unless you're afraid. And all these things are totally normal. Walking your way through them, living your way through them, is the fastest way to get through them. But beyond that, if you find yourself having thoughts that make you doubt yourself, always just double check Is this true? Can I prove that it's true? If I had to go into court of law and prove that everybody hates my presentation because it didn't have slides and I just talked, could I do that? Probably not. You know there may be people who like it. I don't know, I didn't ask. I'm sure there are one or two who would have preferred it maybe visual learners. But I start to think like that and all right. This isn't necessarily factual. It's a thought and thoughts more often than not are wrong. They're just dead wrong. It's a terrible system, but it's what we've got. And what I can say is the more negative things that you focus on, the more you will find more negative things. That's why people recommend gratitude practices writing down three different things that you're grateful for every day, something different every day for 90 days. Each three have to be different for 90 days and it can be as simple as like I'm grateful that my house has heat in the winter. I'm grateful that I had a really good sandwich today. But the more you start doing that, the more you start noticing things to be grateful for, and it's actually, you know. The opposite is also true. The more you look for evidence of oh my God, I'm failing, oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing, the more you're going to find it, because you're not perfect. But the more that's your story, the more you're going to make that story true. You know, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. So Byron Katie came up with this. But is it true? Can I prove that it's true? And her last take on it was who would I be without that thought, which is both kind of cheesy but also really empowering. That's a good perspective shift. So I invite you to try some of those things Fast, messy action, start saying no, take a little focus time to get your own work done and try doing some delegation with your team. It's not going to happen overnight, but those are the things that you're going to have to focus on to become an effective leader, and the more you can hook into that vision and hook into saying kind things to yourself and believing kind things about yourself, the more you're going to be able to lead others. All right. So thank you so much for joining today for another episode of Psychology of Customer Success. If you want to take the next steps in mastering your career as a CS leader and get the recognition and compensation you deserve, go, make sure you're on the waitlist for the next round of CS Leadership Academy, where I walk you through this process step by step, for CS strategy, team leadership and mindset. If you want to say hi, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn I'm off and on there and make sure to go on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. Give us five stars and a nice little review so that I know that you want me to keep making these All right. Talk soon, and here's to your success.