By Sarah Nicastro, Founder and Editor in Chief, Future of Field Service
There’s plenty of discussion around why service leaders deserve a seat at the C-suite “table,” and I don’t disagree. However, while this seat may be deserved, it cannot be demanded. I think there’s value in service leaders reflecting on what beliefs, actions, or habits might be keeping things stuck and perhaps getting honest about where they may benefit from taking a fresh approach.
Roy Dockery, Sr. Director of Field Services Research at TSIA, shared some valuable insights on this topic in a podcast earlier this year. We discussed some of the ways service leaders can become stuck in, and sometimes even perpetuate, the “outsider” role. Roy gave advice, based not only on his interactions with various service organizations but also on his own experience as a service leader, for how leaders can shift their thinking and evolve their actions to yield better results.
Recently, my conversation with Carrie Toth, VP of Customer Experience at Generac Power Systems, reminded me of the podcast earlier this year with Roy. My first impression of Carrie when we connected to discuss a podcast was, wow – this woman is smart. But not only smart, effective. Over her career, Carrie has alchemized her experiences into well-curated skills that allow her to gain influence and inform decisions.
Carrie’s advice, distilled into five tactics, could apply to any leader in any company in any industry, really. She’s shared a real-world guide to conducting yourself in a way that will garner attention and respect, because it’s been earned. If you didn’t listen to the podcast, or aren’t a podcast person, here’s what she suggests.
#1: Take Time to Observe & Assess
Rather than coming in like a wrecking ball, even one formed of passion and good intent, consider slowing down. Carrie suggests taking time to assess the broader organization you’re working in, to invest time in observing before acting. Understanding the dynamics of company culture is crucial to determining how best your objectives fit.
“I find that the company cultures can have many different dynamic elements. Cultures can be around growth. Cultures can be around cost out. If you don't understand those, it's really hard to frame a road map for your team that matches with those cultural aspects as well as the business objectives,” she explains. “And then you're just fighting a battle all the time of what you want for your team and how to make a compelling business case.”
While you might quickly form some of your own opinions, Carrie urges leaders to lean in to the power of listening. “When I come into an organization, I’m really focused on listening. It’s important to do skip-levels with my team as well as peers and then upwards to understand the brand of the team and how people feel about it,” she says. “I’ll use visual boards where we display metrics and say, what do you think about these metrics? I’ll ask questions like, are these the right goals that you think we should be working on? Sometimes I find that we're over invested or trying to achieve something sales aren’t even asking for, which is very costly proposition. Calibrating that the team is working on the right things and has the right goals is crucial and then understanding what's important to those people and what they think we're good at already versus where they think we need to improve.”
These interactions and time spent observing allow Carrie to gain what she refers to as a 360-degree view of what she’s learned triangulated with what a variety of stakeholders, including employees, really think. “That allows me to shape up a short-term game plan of how to get aligned while we create a long-term roadmap. It shows people that you’re listening and have reflected input from stakeholders in your strategy. Sometimes you’re able to shine a light on a disconnect in the organization that needs addressed. But you’re positioning yourself as wanting to calibrate to the environment and to partner and that’s always well-received,” she says.
#2: Earn Your Voice by Building Relevance
Only after you’ve spent ample time observing and listening can you channel that into a voice that builds relevance and will earn attention. Once you understand the company’s biggest objectives, as well as the team’s sentiment, you can determine what focus will be most relatable to senior leadership and most impactful to your function.
How you speak up from here can depend somewhat on your level in the organization, what projects are underway, and what phase of the planning and budgeting cycle the business is in. Carrie suggests considering first how you can get involved in what’s already in play before introducing new ideas. “It’s important to understand the cadence of the business and the forums where you should be plugged in, and then how do you get involved in the right initiatives that are already in motion versus creating a bunch of new ones straight away,” she says.
She also stresses that, particularly for experienced leaders, this can force an exercise of reigning in your views or vision to align to what’s already in play. “You need to take stock of what the team is already working on and what they’ve already determined is important, and find your way to hook in,” Carrie advises. “Sometimes this means changing my own priority list. I may think I need to do these seven things over the next year in order to be successful, but if the team is already funded and resourced to work on number seven, I need to adjust myself to tackling that before number one. Sometimes this is an internal battle within yourself, and you go home pulling your hair out. But it’s important to understand that as long as you get to the endpoint, it doesn’t matter which road you took to get there.”
By staying married less to your own vision, you can dive into what’s in play to instead apply your leadership to steering the project to success while building rapport and creating trust. This then puts you in a better position when the next strategic planning window comes along to ensure your voice is heard and to play a larger role in crafting what’s next.
#3: Practice Smart Storytelling
Storytelling can be a challenge for service leaders because many find they speak quite a different language than the broader business. But it’s an art that will serve you well when it comes to getting buy-in and support for what you feel is most important. Crucial to smart storytelling is knowing your audience and speaking in terms they care about.
Knowing your audience was covered in part in tactic #1 – take the time to observe the dynamics of the broader business and understand the personalities (and motivators) of the key characters. Where I see many service leaders struggle more is in “translating” the world of service – and its challenges and opportunities – into the native language of the C-suite.
Again, Carrie has honed this skill over time. “Generac is a growth company, so it’s focused very much on new customer acquisition and upsell, cross-sell, etc. These are great things to focus on, but I need a lot of foundational things on the team too. So, for me it’s finding ways to position yourself within that growth initiative,” she explains. “If I focus, for example, on how does post-sale sell new equipment, it might not be what I think is the team’s number one mission, but it’s a mission that’s relevant to the business and it’s a story that resonates. I can then frame things I need inside of delivering growth and I do deliver it, but I’ve also gotten the additional pieces that benefit the team overall. It’s a bit more of an art than a science, though.”
Art, indeed! Carrie goes on to explain that while this art of storytelling becomes a more familiar and natural craft, the narrative that works for one business won’t necessarily work for another. “Each business has a different love language, and you have to find that out a little bit through trial and error,” Carrie says. “I remember talking to our leadership team about upsell and cross-sell and then in listening to their feedback, the light bulb goes off. I understand what they need to hear and see and know that if I deliver that, I have the attention and credibility I need.”
#4: Land and Expand
Once you’ve learned to watch for those lightbulb moments and you know what it is that sparks that connection between your story and the target audience, you can then turn language into action. Carrie suggests an approach of “land and expand” – creating value around what’s most important to senior leadership and then using that success to expand into more of what you want to change or accomplish.
“Showing results, even on a small scale, is a way to earn belief that leads to investment,” Carrie explains. “I've done pilots on my team where my team would say things like, why are we working on this when this is the bigger opportunity? And I’m teaching them that, if we can show what we can do to contribute to new equipment growth, then with that excitement we can explain that to do more of it, we need an upgrade to the CRM, or we need a consumer data platform that'll show us this so we can have a more elegant conversation, or we need screen sharing that'll allow us to see their old equipment and position it to the right customers at the right time, or AI lead scoring. Whatever the tool is that we're trying to get, it'll benefit us for post-sale support, as an example, but we frame it in the presale context.”
As Carrie points out, in service and support, you’re often seeking a foundational toolset that is necessary for whatever scenario you’re working toward – so this act of framing it around what’s most important to the business is a way to gain relevance and buy-in but helps in accomplishing many other objectives as well. You’re simply storytelling around the topics your audience cares most about.
#5: Always Remain Agile
While the skills throughout these tactics are translatable, the storylines and narrative and audience members will change. So, service leaders must become adept at being agile. Objectives change, plans need to shift, success criteria evolve – and you have to obviate these waves and be proactive in how you respond.
Carrie relies on lean methodology with a heavy dose of common sense. “Most businesses still have some type of continuous improvement team. Historically, these are more plant-based resources or people that might be a headquarters team that get farmed out to a variety of ops teams to drive productivity. You're always begging for those resources because the plant has so many different needs and I've just found in my career that I always lose to the plant. So, for me, it's a non-negotiable when you have a large team, very complex processes, and work across many different systems to work on process and lean because it is so meaningful for productivity and for the employee experience,” says Carrie, “I’ve always had a dedicated CI leader, and I see that as a bit of a secret sauce. Having that CI leader on the team, they're infused in a lot of different cadence meetings, huddles, stand ups, project reviews, and that allows them to work on the cultural pieces. I think having a dedicated person and using those tools consistently and for culture is key.”
A Note on Authenticity
I find myself wanting to add a few notes here after reflecting on Carrie’s advice, particularly for those who will read through this insight rather than listen to the podcast. First, it was clear to me in our discussion that what Carrie is suggesting here is smart communication and the application of emotional intelligence.
In my opinion, Carrie is not suggesting being inauthentic or staying quiet when you feel it’s right to speak up. The use of these tactics isn’t to “play” people or to be anything less than transparent; rather to intelligently position your needs or ideas in terms you’ve taken the time to learn the audience cares about.
I say this because I think there are a lot of nuances here – any of these tactics, if poorly executed, could backfire and have the opposite effect than intended. And this is precisely what was so impressive to me about Carrie – that she isn’t presenting this advice as how to “play the game,” but rather what she’s learned over years of experience in how to communicate and build influence genuinely and effectively.