Jeremy Donaldson, Senior Customer Success Manager at PowerSchool and Founding Member of Gain Grow Retain tells UpdateAI how he answers the question “what do you do when you’re the only one left?”
What do you do when you’re the only one left?
Well, let me tell you about a time where this happened to me.
I’ve experienced 100% turnover as a Manager of CSMs. All left for different reasons:
– One secured an external promotion
– One started his own consulting practice
– One moved into an operational role
All three pursued their career dreams, and I was the biggest fan through the whole process. However, the reality remained the same. 1 person is now doing the work of 4 people…well, 5 people since we were already understaffed prior to the departures.
So, you lost members of your team. How do you manage to reset expectations, continue to hit deliverables, and hire and train replacements without losing your sanity?
Three words: Set extreme boundaries
What do I mean by setting extreme boundaries?
1) Setting hard start and end times for your day.
When you are the only one on your team to manage the workload of multiple people, it is extremely important for your mental health to treat your day like you would treat any other work day. Yes, circumstances are different, but you still can’t do it all. You only have so many hours in the day that you can work. You only have so much capacity to get things done. It’s okay and normal to not get to everything every single day. If your leadership doesn’t support this, then I’d recommend looking for a new role.
2) Saying “no” to everything that does not help bring efficiency to your team.
Saying “no” doesn’t mean you are trying to be unhelpful. Saying “no” means that you are trying to set expectations that are in alignment with what you can properly deliver given your current capacity.
Saying “no” also doesn’t mean that it’s a no forever. Often through these times of adjustment, a ‘short-term no’ is needed to properly align on what is most important. When capacity and resources expand in the future, it may be entirely possible that you can go back and revisit what was once not a priority but is now a nice-to-have for your team.
3) Ask for help.
The power for asking help that cannot be understated. When you have no rope left to give, it’s time to find someone else who can step in and share the workload with you. For customer success managers, this could mean a number of different approaches including: moving how-to questions to your support team, delivering training in a 1-to-many fashion rather than 1-on-1, reducing frequency of success meetings, and asking for occasional team support on account coverage if you can’t meet with a customer.
Asking for help doesn’t mean that you have to ask them to take over your customers. It could simply be asking for somebody to help write an email, lead a webinar, document a process, or schedule a meeting.
Managing turnover will always be difficult, but these few steps have helped me and they can help you too.