Fixing broken support: learning and planning
Not fixies. That's something else
Dig, if you will, the picture: you’re a new support leader and are just getting to know your new team, but at first glance you’re not quite sure why you were hired. The team has established processes and procedures, and seems to be providing good support to your customers already. Yet during the hiring process, company leaders emphasized that they wanted you to make nebulous, unspecified improvements. Where do you start?
Sometimes the situation is a lot more clear cut than that. The team you’ve just inherited is clearly underperforming, or not nearly big enough for the support burden placed on it, or has morale issues that have no obvious cause but are no less real for that. In situations like this you have a clear starting point for investigation and improvement, but though the diagnosis may be obvious the treatment is less so.
In comparison to last week’s topic, this one is significantly thornier. The support team you’re now leading has something wrong with it and instead of building its procedures and inter-team relationships from scratch, you need to fix its problems while still providing support and meeting the team’s existing obligations. A lot of what you need to do is the same as what I discussed last week, so I won’t repeat everything from there, but instead I’ll focus on pitfalls and opportunities specific to this situation.
Finding out what’s wrong
Sometimes the issue is clear, either because it was part of the hiring process or because you can see with your own eyes that something is not functioning properly. In that case you can move straight on to formulating a plan for improvement, but sometimes it can be a little more complicated than that. Maybe, as above, everything seems to be working well. Maybe you can instinctively tell that there is a disconnect but haven’t yet been able to place it. Or maybe there is a distinct lack of morale and esprit de corps but the reason is unclear. Whatever the case, it is time to dig in and find out what exactly is wrong.
Start by talking to the person who hired you. If these conversations didn’t already happen during your interviews, or if you received contradictory or incomplete information, now is the time to remedy that. Before anything else, you need answers to these questions:
What is the most urgent thing that needs to be improved on the support team?
What do you believe is the reason this has become a problem?
What is the time frame in which this issue must be improved?
Once you’ve heard from your own leader, ask the same questions (with appropriate modulations) of other leaders to make sure everyone is in agreement about what needs to happen. If you’re hearing different things with different people, your own leadership will obviously take precedence, but it’s worth bringing others’ concerns into the conversation to ensure your boss knows what the concerns might be on other teams.
But your listening tour doesn’t end here! Ask the same questions of everyone on your own team. Obviously their perspectives will be more limited, and you shouldn’t take anything they say as gospel, but the answers will be revealing. If not everyone on your team agrees on what is wrong, that is a useful data point. If people disagree on why the team is in its current situation, that is also very good to know. This is information that also needs to be shared with leadership, because it speaks to a failure of communication somewhere along the chain. Though you and your own leaders have the final decision on what is broken and how to go about starting to address it, it would be a mistake not to gather information as widely as possible before making that decision. The folks closest to the actual work have a perspective that is not available to folks higher up in the organization, and sometimes can see things that are invisible to higher levels. Morale issues, particularly, are best expressed by the people experiencing them, not just guessed at by managers, directors, and the C-suite.
Planning
At this point, you should have a clear understanding of the most urgent problem or problems on the team, and some understanding of what is causing them. The obvious next step is to put together a plan and get buy-in. Obviously the details of any plan are going to be specific to your individual situation, but here are some general things to keep in mind:
Don’t settle for band-aids. If customers are complaining that it takes too long to get a response when they email your team, don’t just slap on an autoresponder and call it a day. Take the time to figure out the underlying issues and develop a plan to address them.
That said, a band-aid can be a good way to stop the bleeding today. Go ahead and turn on the autoresponder, but make sure you are making larger structural changes to ensure the customer experience is actually improved beyond getting an immediate canned response.
Buy-in from your own leadership and from the individuals on your team are both critical to success. Once you have a plan, gather feedback from all stakeholders and incorporate it. If your leaders don’t agree with your course of action, you may be overruled. If your team doesn’t agree with it, or understand it, they might just ignore it or in extreme cases sabotage it.
But don’t expect your team, or your own leaders, to do this planning for you. In the end this is your team and your responsibility to determine the appropriate path forward.
A note on timing
I’ve just spent a lot of time describing an in-depth process of talking, listening, and planning. It’s tempting to fall into the trap of cycling through these steps over and over, building and refining a plan but never starting to execute it because not everyone is completely on board. Don’t let this happen! As in all things, perfection will never be achieved, and you’ll just have to go ahead with what you’ve got. In fact, the more urgent the problem, the faster you’re going to have to move, so it’s guaranteed that your plan won’t be perfect—and that’s fine! The only thing you really need is to be sure your plan won’t break things further. Any other outcome is fine, and at the very least will buy you time to plan further improvements. As a general rule of thumb, less than a month into a new job is too short a time to start making major changes, but for serious issues (especially ones you were brought on specifically to address) you should have started implementing your plan by or before three months in.
Next time: you know what’s wrong and you’re taking steps to fix it. What could go wrong? Stand by for the thrilling conclusion!
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!