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How customer success leaders can help their teams manage stress
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The good news is that you’re almost certainly not alone, suggests stress management and productivity coach Ryan Johansen—and that the sooner you understand this and take action, the faster you’ll learn to help yourself and your team manage stress better.
In the first installment of a three-part series with Ryan Johansen, we looked into what causes stress in customer success teams, and why.
In part two, we dug into how customer success leaders can respond, which stressors you can influence as a manager, and how you can and manage your team toward a better handling of the ups and downs of the rewarding but demanding world of CS.
Q: Which stress factors in customer success are team managers able to influence, and which are outside their control?
RJ: Overall, I see the factors of stress in CS as fitting into four buckets:
1: External factors. Your team have things going on in their personal life, which have nothing to do with work, but which can affect how they come to work. There’s very little you can do here, other than be empathetic and support them.
2: Internal. This bucket includes factors like each team member’s own relationship to stress, and how they process difficult situations. Some people are naturally wound a bit tighter than others. You can help these people work through some of the negative thoughts and stories that people tell themselves.
For example, I remember my boss reaching out to me when I lost a big renewal that I worked hard for. He knew me well enough to tell me not to beat myself up over this all weekend. As a manager, you can help your team not take things personally, especially junior members who might not have been through this before, and think about things in a more healthy way.
3: People. In CS, people deal with ton of conflict. A lot of things can go wrong: an escalation that pops up, maybe a feature thing, maybe something a customer was promised that didn’t come true.
For some people, dealing with conflict comes easily. For others, these conversations are massively difficult. You can help your team learn to have them, empower them with skill building, and work on their confidence to make a difference.
*Related: There’s no avoiding conflict in customer success—but you can learn to handle it with confidence. Register for Ryan’s upcoming ChurnZero webinar to learn how. *
4: Workload. You might have people on your team who work a ton but don’t get the right things done. You might also have an executive team who always has a few new ideas to roll out. As a manager, you can help narrow your team’s focus and make sure they know what’s important.
You don’t need to be a micromanager and go over every single minute of their day, but you do need to sit down with your team for spot checks, where you check in on their top priorities and make sure you’re on the same page.
Q: What are the most meaningful ways in which that managers can help their team manage stress?
RJ: Address the priorities part before the productivity part.
It’s better for your team to be doing the right things than doing everything the right way. That’s my number-one tip. Aligning your team’s priorities with your company goals and your team goals is a concrete way to minimize their stress.
If your CSMs are trying to do everything and failing, it sucks. When you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions, it feels like you’re failing because you’re trying to do so many things. When a manager limits a team’s focus, and they know what they need to do, the team becomes so much more confident because they see actual wins.
It’s also good to have a way of proactively working through your business. The Eisenhower Matrix is a good exercise, which I’ve shared in a webinar before. It’s a good way to have your team walk through what’s most important so that they can organize their day around it.
Empower your team to run their day the way they need to, without reacting to everything around them and getting less done as a consequence. You might want to coach them for how to respond when someone else asks for something outside of a reasonable scope: Hey, I’m focused on X, Y, and Z, but maybe I can get to it tomorrow, or what should I deprioritize?
In the end, though, it’s difficult for managers because people hold back. It’s common to feel shame about feeling burned out, even when you have a good relationship with your boss like I did. You can’t pry it out of someone, as that can lead to a poor situation to where you make someone uncomfortable, and ultimately, they don’t have to say anything to you.
Q: As well as looking out for their team, what signs should managers recognize as signals that they themselves are getting overwhelmed?
RJ: One thing that I beat myself up for is I would be a stressed out mess and I could start to see it rub off on my team. Then I would beat myself up for not holding it together well enough and it compounded the problem.
Being a leader is a huge responsibility where you not only impact someone’s livelihood, but also their home life. It’s so important to take care of yourself and start to understand what causes your stress and some effective ways to manage it.
Q: What should stressed-out managers do when they see the signs?
RJ: There’s no perfect practice, or three steps to not being stressed out anymore. But, as a manager, finding someone else you can talk to will make all the difference in the world. When you feel like you’re the only one dealing with it, you can beat yourself up even worse. When you have no objectivity around the situation, it feels terrible—whereas if you talk to another person who might also be going through it, or who went there before you, you can get a couple of quick answers.
There’s a lot of power in being able to find out what mistakes to avoid, or simply in getting a neutral perspective that says: you’re being way too hard on yourself. Take a step back. Try this or that.
I, myself, had the very false expectation that when I became a leader, I would have it all figured out. Far from it. But the more I started leaning on my own leaders, the faster I started progressing, and the more I started talking to other people who have been through it. That’s what made the biggest difference.
Q: What else can make a difference?
RJ: When I used to have good days, which happened fairly often, I would write out everything I liked about work. I wrote my wins down too.
I did this because a good mood is contagious, and on days where things don’t go right, and you feel like a total failure, you have objective data on a paper in front of you that says: not everything is going completely poorly. As a manager, if you can teach your team to do this, you empower them with a stress reduction skill.
The other thing you can do is call out your team’s wins in a particular way: encouragement, versus praise.
Praise is saying: you’re a rockstar, that we couldn’t do it without you; that you’re the best ever. It’s not really specific, and it can make you feel a little bit uncomfortable receiving it in front of your team. Encouragement is more about the person and the effort they put in. “I’m proud of the way that you handled that. You prepared very well.”
It’s a more powerful force for leaders, because you can encourage while acknowledging that not everything goes well in CS. You can say: hey, I know that you know that call didn’t go amazing—but I was impressed with the way you prepped, and the way that you’re growing. Encouragement focuses on good behavior, which goes a long way and instils confidence.
Now, obviously, if someone saves a big deal or a renewal, you should celebrate it. Yet, results come and go. People get lucky; we’ve all seen it. When you reward continuous effort, though, it builds confidence, and the feeling of winning, and good results come from that.
Did you catch part one of our series? Learn what causes stress in CS, and why.
If you want to learn more about Ryan or have him work with your team, check out his website for more information and resources.
And don’t miss Ryan’s forthcoming ChurnZero webinar, on how to handle difficult customer success conversations with confidence, on Wednesday, March 20.