Taking over a high-functioning team
Looking a gift horse in the mouth
Over the last few weeks I’ve talked a lot about the different situations you might find yourself in as a new support leader: building a team from scratch, joining a growing team to help systematize and scale it, and taking over a team in need of serious overhauls. But there’s one last situation I haven’t discussed yet: taking over a team that is already established and functioning well. You knew this during the hiring process, you didn’t see any red flags through the interview process, and now you’re sitting down on Day 1. Your only mandate is ‘this team works well, so keep it going.’ So what do you do? If you think the answer is ‘Nothing! Everything is working!’, you’re right! Go have a donut and drink some coffee.
Just kidding.
No team just falls accidentally into working well, never mind staying that way without constant attention. You can’t just sit back and expect the machine to keep running without maintenance. So your first order of business, in addition to my usual drumbeat of ‘learn the product, learn the support process, etc.’, is to find out a few things for yourself.
Are things really as good as they say?
Maybe! But it’s best to find out for sure. As you’re getting to know your team, your counterparts on other teams, and your own leaders, be sure to get everyone’s take on:
How do you think the support team is functioning?
Where do you think we’re falling down?
If there’s one thing you could change about how the team functions today, what would it be?
Of course there will be as many opinions and suggestions as there are people, but you may start to detect certain themes. Maybe ticket followup could be improved. Maybe handing off issues between teams has never been quite as smooth and consistent as it should be. Follow up on these observations to see if there’s anything to them beyond personal preferences.
And always keep in mind that no matter how well things are going, there is always room for improvement. Perhaps ironically, the better your team functions, the more the remaining points of friction will stick out. If your customers are receiving a great support experience 50% of the time that they need help, then they expect to be let down a lot, and won’t be surprised by it. But if they’re getting great support 99% of the time, the rare occasions that your team drops the ball will stick out a lot more and be proportionally more disappointing. So the better you are, the harder you may have to work to keep your customers happy. The trick, of course, is discovering the point of diminishing returns, when further investment into the team’s quality doesn’t lead to meaningful improvements in customer experience.
How did the team get this way?
It’s worth repeating: high-functioning teams don’t just happen. Someone, probably a lot of someones, put in a lot of work to make them that way. You need to find out who is responsible for how things developed the way they did, and why. You probably won’t have to try too hard to get people to talk about it, because they’ve got a lot to be proud about. I call that the team’s mythology: stories that team members tell each other, and things they’re sure to share with new team members as they join.
“When I started, we didn’t even have standards for writing team emails! But over the last couple years we’ve come a long way. Jane really helped everyone up their game.” “We used to have to gather all this information about customers manually, now it just shows up in our ticketing tool. You can thank Ed for that, he worked with the infrastructure team to get it all set up.” Talk to Jane and Ed. Find out what the status quo was, what the thought process was for making the changes they did, and any alternatives they may have considered. The more you understand about why and how the team’s tools and techniques evolved, the better equipped you will be to maintain them. While the team mythology shouldn’t be relied upon as a complete (or accurate) accounting of team history, it is a good place to start. And it’s essential in its own right to understanding how the team thinks of itself and its capabilities.
Side note: the previous team leader
Similarly to the discussion last week, the previous leader of the support team may or may not still be present. While a full discussion of learning to work with existing support leadership is outside the scope of today’s article (on the list it goes…), there are a few things of particular importance to note here. If the former leader has departed, learn what you can about how they operated and why they made the choices they did while getting to know the rest of the team. If they’re still around, your job is much easier because you can discuss directly with them.
If you are managing them: well, they’re not the former support leader, are they? Let them keep doing what they’re doing, since it’s working so well. Your own input will become increasingly valuable as you learn the ropes, but don’t upend things just for the sake of change.
If they’re managing you: then they’ve probably moved up in the world and are responsible for more than just support. Learn what you can from them, and prove that you can continue the team’s tradition of excellence. But once you are established, remember that you are a leader in your own right. Don’t be afraid to make necessary improvements and process updates as the company grows, your customer base changes, and the market evolves.
How can you make sure things keep going well?
By this time you should have a good understanding of where your team is doing well, where it could be doing better, and how it got that way in the first place. Those are the building blocks you need to construct your plan for the next 3 months: as you establish yourself with your new team, how do you keep it functioning as well as it did before your arrival? Don’t worry yet about improvements—make sure that you can maintain the status quo for the time being. After all, that’s why you were hired. Pay close attention to the team’s founding mythology, but don’t follow it too slavishly. You’re not the same person as the team’s previous leader, and you shouldn’t try to be. If the last team leader had an extraordinarily high level of emotional intelligence, and you do not, don’t try to ape that. You were hired for your own particular skillset, and that is how you should lead. Ask yourself how you can best support the team with your own strengths.
Once you have put down roots in the new team, learned the hows and whys of their high performance, and ensured you’re not going to accidentally disrupt it, it’s time to start thinking about the future. You’ll probably already have some ideas about how to lead the team to its next stage by now, so start planning, and always remember to keep everyone in the loop. After all, the only thing more satisfying than leading a high-functioning team is helping them become even better.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!