PicoBlog

Imagine the following scenario: You’re the head of a post-sales customer success team for a small-ish software company. Despite the struggling economy, your company is doing surprisingly well. You’ve grown your team considerably over the past year and plan to open up new roles soon so you can keep up with demand. But not everything is roses.

You sit down to your laptop to start preparing for your day and the very first email in your inbox is from your top customer success manager. They just got sent a new “closed-won” customer in need of onboarding, but the sales team totally botched the deal, overselling the product’s features and giving your CSM the Sisyphean task of having to onboard a customer that will never be happy within the limitations of your product. For crying out loud—how many of these deals are they going to keep sending us?

It feels like you’ve been over this a thousand times with the sales team and your team is clearly getting tired of it. You’re noticing a conspicuous lack of 👏 emojis from CSMs when new deals show up in the company Slack. Why is this so hard?

Why is everything so broken?

A few years back, I attended a workshop which was was loosely based on the book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. In the opening chapters, there’s a section titled “The Illusion of the Broken System”, which reads:

There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be “dysfunctional” in some respects to some members and outside observers, and even though it faces danger just over the horizon. As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, “There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.”

Maybe you reacted to that paragraph the way I did when I first read it:

No, you don’t understand, the system is broken…

… just hold on while I list the reasons …

… have you even seen who they’re hiring over there? …

… they obviously don’t care about the customer! …

… it’s a complete mess—no, there couldn’t possibly be a reasonable explanation for what’s going on …

… could there be???

I wanted to fight that paragraph so hard when I first read it. Despite my wanting to get excited about the principals and techniques for adaptive leadership discussed in the book, I had the hardest time accepting that systems can’t be fundamentally broken. Because if they’re not broken, they don’t need to be fixed, and surely there are systems that need to be fixed, right? Right?

Many of us who work in customer-facing roles take great pride in caring for the customer. We’ve been on the receiving end of poor customer experiences ourselves, so we’re going to do our very best to deliver a remarkable experience to the customers we serve. It’s more than what we do. It’s who we are. We understand the nuances of how you shape experiences to reduce friction, increase delight, and deliver value. We’re often hired for our expertise so the companies we work for can become brands known for the outstanding experiences they deliver to customers. That’s perhaps why we get so perturbed when coworkers in other parts of the organization appear not to care about customer experience in the same way we do.

It’s no wonder, then, when we witness customer experience failures originating from within our organizations, our first inclination might be to think that something is broken.

I like the word “broken” here, not because it’s the right word—I’ve come to align my thinking with the Adaptive Leadership authors that there’s no such thing as a broken system—but rather because “broken” is how it feels. And if you know how something feels, you can start to recognize it, and if you recognize the feeling, the next time it happens, you can be more conscious about how you respond.

When you believe something passionately and then something else clashes against that belief, it can feel personal. It can feel like something is broken. And if something is broken, then it needs to be fixed, right?

Sometimes fixing is the right approach. If there’s a bug in the software, you edit the code to fix the bug. If a member of your team isn’t following the standard operating procedure you’ve laid out, you coach them to help them to address it. But what if someone on another team in another part of the organization is doing something that appears “wrong” or “broken”—what do you do then? What happens when you try to “fix” their behavior? You shouldn’t be surprised when you get pushback. From their perspective, nothing is broken. Nothing is wrong.

How do we try to fix something when we know we’re right? One thing I’ve found always seems to accompany the feeling of “brokenness” is the feeling of “rightness”, or righteousness, within myself. This is especially true in the area of customer experience, but it can apply to almost anything. “Don’t they see what a terrible experience they’re giving to customers? Ugh!”. The feeling of my own righteousness about something that I believe is important will drive me to fight and fix whatever it is I feel is broken. Sometimes that drive produces positive outcomes, but in many cases it can become misplaced and render itself ineffective.

I find this quote from the Adaptive Leadership book helpful here:

When you realize that what you see as dysfunctional works for others in the system, you begin focusing on how to mobilize and sustain people through the period of risk that often comes with adaptive change, rather [than] trying to convince them of the rightness of your cause.

That last bit is a dagger to my ego. Are you saying being right doesn’t matter? It might matter. It might not. But it’s not always helpful. And if you channel all your energy into your own rightness, you’ll actively harm your efforts to lead adaptive change.

I wish that earlier in my career, I could have seen this more clearly. I spent a lot of energy being frustrated at sales teams for being “wrong”. I wasn’t valuing the work they were doing. By myopically focusing on failures in customer experience which were affecting my team, I frequently lost sight of positive outcomes that resulted from their work, such as consistently increasingly revenue, expanding purchases with existing customers, and continuing to close larger enterprise deals. To be sure, there were legitimate customer experience issues that needed to be addressed, but the system wasn’t broken. Not by a long shot.

So if the system isn’t broken, what can you do? A lot, actually. Whether you’re coming from a place of authority or influence, what we’re talking about is leadership. Books like The Practice of Adaptive Leadership or Extreme Ownership will provide plenty of perspective and many techniques for tackling challenging scenarios where everything feels broken but nothing seems to work. But regardless of which leadership manual you go with, it’s important to remember: the system isn’t broken.

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