233: Fireside with Craig Stoss

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and thirty-three of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, please welcome Craig Stoss for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Craig Stoss. Craig, lovely to have you back. Thank you for joining me again at the start of the year. We can st it's the third week of January. We can still call it the start of the year, can't we?

Craig Stoss: 0:46

Yeah, happy new year. I guess it's the first time we've talked in 2022.

Charlotte Ward: 0:50

It is, it is absolutely right. Yeah, happy new year to you too, indeed. Um it seems to me to be a good time to be talking about the topic, which I did kind of I felt like I I got you here like with one of those shepherdesses kind of crooks. Like, you know, in in the cartoons where like this hook comes, or or like in old time music call or whatever your cultural reference might be, this stick comes in from the side of the stage or the side of the screen, grabs you by the neck, and pulls you into this conversation. Uh so thank you for joining me because here we are at the start of the year. And I just figured it would be a good time to talk about OKRs. There we go. I said the words. Um, goal setting, uh, you know, what the direction is for the next month, quarter, half year, whatever the cadence is for kind of setting direction for your team and setting those measures up, right?

Craig Stoss: 1:48

Yeah. I mean, in the case of some poorly run OKR programs I've been a part of, you know, the next few days, you know, before people forget about them. So I uh yeah, I goal setting is always important at the start of of any kind of milestone. And people tend to, for whatever reason, be believe that start of a year is a milestone, New Year's resolutions and all that, start of your fiscal year, start of a quarter, um, you know, things things like that that that uh signify a milestone or or uh start of something new. Um which it which I'm not against, but I think the the the falter on a lot of goals is people understanding their place, you know, and and I I've seen so often, you know, leaders get together, they go on these fancy retreats and beautiful hotels and and come back with these amazing goals. We're gonna increase revenue by 70%, and yeah, and we're you know, we're going to reduce churn by this uh you know big number, or we're gonna raise so much money and capital and or hire a thousand people or whatever these massive goals are. And and then there's you know, the guy that was hired last week to do frontline support who is saying, uh oh, okay, you know, yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 3:04

How do I relate to that, right?

Craig Stoss: 3:06

Yeah, yeah, there's there's no relation to that. And and so, you know, I I like OKRs because I think you know, having a clear set of objectives is is good. Um I feel uh you know, I feel also creating those key results is also something you can really use to tie to those individual contributors uh or those more junior leaders, frontline leaders, um, who can really tangibly start to see what what their outcome should be and what they should be striving towards. Um, but I feel like more often than not, there's always that gap. There's always a gap between what the leadership kind of you know comes down uh you know, on the tablets, you know, saying this is this is the what we're doing, and and and the frontline people uh understanding how they how they achieve that.

Charlotte Ward: 3:56

Yeah, I think I think that's right. And I think I think um, you know, that gap is one thing and like how you draw the line between what somebody on the front line is doing and you know what somebody three levels up might have decided seems a reasonable goal that that person can contribute to. That's um that's that's a challenge for us kind of in the middle kind of leaders, isn't it? Like that you know, we know what we need to achieve. We also actually I find it kind of um I I feel sort of like I'm I'm having to like operate in two directions, look both ways. You know, I have to manage up, I have to manage down. I know that I have to achieve the goals of my organization, of my wider business function, whatever, but but I also know that I'm trying to deliver stuff inside my team. And the two should join up. You should be working on things that benefit the business. But one of the conflicts I often find myself in is I I've got this, frankly, I've got this shit that needs to be done. And it just has to be done, and it's not always even to me as as the leader of that team, never mind one of one of my frontline staff, how I draw the line between those two things.

Craig Stoss: 5:21

Yeah, I and and I you've hit the nail on the head, right? And this is again, I think another another problem with the OKR model is it's like you know, you've been tasked with a day job, you know, you you you maybe you're tripling the size of your team. And so hiring is so important to you. And and sure, there might be ways to tie hiring to you know revenue growth or some of these other other uh targets. Um, but but that those day day-to-day things always seem to take precedence, which maybe they should. And and so, you know, I really applaud, you know, Google made OKRs really, really kind of famous. And as far as I know, that's the first place I ever heard of that that really took this, um, took these things uh seriously. And I applaud them at a company that size because you know it's hard to keep 200 people aligned, let alone 20, 30, 40,000 people. So I um but yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head with with the middle leadership is is you know, you're trying to sit here and say, you know, here's these goals, and we're everything we should do should align to these goals. Um, while at the same time, you you're not you're not really practicing that because it's like, yeah, but I had a fire today because a customer needed me as a sport leader to solve this critical issue. And so, you know, my calendar got wiped so I could spend time solving this problem. And how does that tie into some some you know more philosophical goal?

Charlotte Ward: 6:47

Yeah, yeah, philosophical or strategic, or you know, it's kind of there, there's always big things that have to move. There's always big things that need delivering, there's always big numbers that need to be hit, but there is the day job. There is customer fire, there is, as you say, the calendar that gets wiped out for whatever reason, you know, you're trying to hire at the same time, or people are leaving at the same time, or you know, um, like anything, right? Anything.

Craig Stoss: 7:19

Yeah. The yeah, and I think that's that's it. So the the best implementation of goal setting, which admittedly was not the traditional OKR model, um, but the best implementation I ever saw was something called a balanced scorecard. And the balanced scorecard uh started with the those strategic, philosophical, high-level goals on the left. And it was like, here is what the CEO is talking about, uh, you know, on the left. And then kind of at each level of uh it broke it down into smaller, almost like uh like almost like a decision tree type look, where it was like, okay, number one uh breaks down into these, you know, these things, you know, and these things are the focus of the VPs. And then each of those breaks down into maybe uh specific functions. So like this, these are the folk focus of the support department. And then, and then the next thing would be here's how it breaks down at the um, you know, at the uh middle management level of of the support department, and then from there to the associates, and and how it, if you do it correctly, um there really is a tangible goal for everyone to look at every day and know if they're doing that thing. And so you might take something like revenue growth. Again, I keep going back to that one because it's a very common one, and and and take that all the way down and say, you know how support drives revenue is by ensuring quality service in is in an appropriate average handle time and you tie metrics to that. That's your key result, right? Is you know, your handle time needs to be uh your first response time and your handle time have to be in these margins. And and if you and if you do that and maintain you know uh quality level service, that's gonna do X for you know your leadership, which is gonna do Y for your your department, which is gonna do Z for your um your VP, which is gonna you know tie into revenue growth somehow, you know? And it's a really interesting way of breaking it down, and and it's also so much clearer because the first question I always get after you know some uh meet, you know, company hand all hands where goals are presented is okay, well, what do I do differently tomorrow than I that I than I'm doing today? Yeah. And yeah, and the thing is sometimes you're not doing anything differently, you're just you're just focusing on something a bit more specifically, a bit more adamantly, you know, on your day-to-day.

Charlotte Ward: 9:43

Yeah, yeah. The what the way it manifests from yesterday to tomorrow is it could be you, you know, you you find a little efficiency. You you work in a in a slightly better way. You, you know, you figure out what the thing is that allows you to hit your metric as the leader of that team, you know, and that and that's and that ancestry, and I think that's how I look at it, um, it in that tree that you're talking about, from from frontline all the way up to the CEO, being able to draw what you're asking of your of your team, going back one stage, going back one stage again, going back one stage again. That kind of ancestry, I think, is if it's transparent, everyone should be able to see that ancestry as well. I think that that's really important for for me. And and that's what I do. We are we use that method where I am now, so I can see that ancestry, and I make sure that my team see that ancestry as well. So I say, here's what I'm asking you to do. This is how it sits inside this set, and this is what this sits inside, you know. Um, and and you go up the tree, and like this is how what we're doing here joins up. So being able to describe it and and show it is important, I think. Um yeah, and then and then the the other point about uh that sort of ancestry, the the way you talked about it there. I think I just want to give a slightly different take on because the um maybe maybe really you agree with this anyway, but coming down that tree, coming down that decision tree from the top, you you almost presented it as though it was increasing levels of division. And I think actually what I found is that at each layer in that tree, actually what you should be looking for is kind of collaboration and overlap. Because uh, and I think that that the same is true as we look uh we look as we look at our agents. And instead of saying, right, here's the thing I want you to deliver, and here's the thing I want you to deliver, it's like how much can you get together and support each other to deliver both your goals? It's like divide and conquer everything is one way of looking at it, but actually, two problems between two people doesn't mean one problem each necessarily. You know, you can both work, both work towards a you know, a common set of goals as well. And um and what I find operating inside a customer office as a customer office leader is that the things that I want to work on for the benefit of my upstream upstream, my my ancestral goals, and my and my downstream, my support business as usual goals and metrics. What I look for in my own peers in the customer office, i.e., the other customer office leaders, is places where we can support each other. What do I need in support? And what are you doing in onboarding? Where can we join up so such that we both benefit both of our goals? And I think that's really important. It's it's not always about just division down, it's like how can we actually collaborate and both achieve? Because probably actually collaborating is going to help you both in the end, anyway.

Craig Stoss: 13:02

Yeah. I mean, I love that take, and and you know, support exhibits this all the time. You know, you you're you're presenting a defect to your product management team in the software space, and their goals don't align with yours. You're you're trying to fix a problem and they're trying to add a new feature, and and they're you butt heads, right? So who's correct? And and the you know, short answer is both, or or maybe neither, you know, and and and so yeah, what you've described is is kind of how you solve that problem is is a line. Okay, well, maybe it's a percentage, you know, so much percent of time needs to be spent on fixing you know production issues versus uh versus a new feature or something to to that effect, right? It's um yeah, I I absolutely could get behind that that model, that you know, that that idea of collaboration being part of the uh the objective or you know, or the or the outcomes that you're going for.

Charlotte Ward: 13:58

Yeah, yeah. And I want to just rewind briefly back to something you said right at the start of this conversation when you where you talked about cadences, uh, you know, and these kind of arbitrary cussover points, you know, end of year, end of fiscal year, end of quarter, end of month. Um personally, I have probably not set a new year's resolution, a personal New Year's resolution, since I was in my teens when I it seemed the thing that everybody at school was doing, but then I realized how foolhardy it was. As soon as I hit adulthood, I thought, what am I doing? This is the worst time of year to try something new. And what does January the first mean as opposed to a week Wednesday? You know. Um now for for the point of view of from the point of view of OKRs, the the key result aspect of that has to be measurable. And like in in every smart goal sense, it has to be there for time bound, doesn't it? It has to have a point at which you know you've achieved it. You know the thing is complete, delivered, met, whatever it is, um, that that goal is achieved. But do OKRs always have to sit inside a quarter? Do they always have to sit inside whatever the cadence is? What's your take on that?

Craig Stoss: 15:19

I mean, I I think the answer has to be no. I I you know, I I talked I talked about, I think you and I talked about this at some point about this idea of the definition of done that they talk about in Scrum Master Training and the Agile framework. And and you know, there there has to be some definition of done for whatever you're doing. What you know, that's true in personal life as well as in business, but that doesn't mean the thing is done, you know, it means you reach some milestone that you can consider done, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 15:54

Yeah, some checkbox that has been ticked, yeah.

Craig Stoss: 15:57

Exactly. And and so I just renovated my my basement, and and you know, the first the first thing that need to be done was they put up the the studs, and and then the second was they put up the drywall, and and you know, and then someone else would show up to paint, and someone else would show up to put the carpet in, and and and et cetera, et cetera. And there was all these kind of like cutoffs. So, you know, but is the basement ever going to be done? You know, we could put new furniture in there, we can put new artwork up. I don't know is if a basement is ever truly completely finished, you know, being being worked on. And software is exactly the same. Your software is never done. Um, you know, might you hit milestones along the way that you might, you know, release, and and that's certainly changed in the SAS world from from the you know, the on-prem software where you released, you know, hot fixes and and you know, service packs and things like that. Um, and so so yeah, uh time bound is good, but but maybe milestone bound is a better way of thinking about it. And and I I truly don't know what the right answer is here. I think in support, there's always these milestones don't align the same way as they do with with a sales, you know, sales people, you know, there's there's lots of companies that joke about, you know, you measure your you measure your tenure at a company in quarters, not in in you know, anniversaries like like other functions, right? And and it's and and sales, sales has just always aligned to that. In support, what does a quarter actually mean to support? Right? It it generally speaking, probably not much. You know, it's it's we're not impacted by a quarter, end of quarters, not busy. Now, depending on your business, you might have Christmas might be busy if you're in e-commerce, you know, uh, you know, uh, there might be a spike in the summer if you're a seasonal product, you know, something like that, right? Um and so, so maybe those are are more year milestones and more your timelines of hey, by the time we hit you know March of a year, we have to have this hit this milestone because you know that means we're prepared for the summer rush or or something like that, right? Um, so I I feel like it's gonna have to be different um for every team. So to shorten all that, uh time bound of some nature is definitely important. Um uh maybe milestone bound is is more important to some departments than others, and and I also think that not every function in the company is treated the same way or should be treated the same way because you know it just doesn't make sense in certain contexts.

Charlotte Ward: 18:23

Yeah, yeah, I think I agree. And and I think the final thing I would say is if you are in an organization where that cadence is really already sent. And and frankly, most organizations operate by the quarter or by the half, don't they?

Craig Stoss: 18:40

Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 18:41

Um so if if you're in that business, then I think you just have to kind of develop the skill of breaking things down, you know. So much of what you do in support is is is either rolling or has a longer cadence than the quarter, or it has a, as you say, like a staggered, like a staggered seasonality or whatever it is. Um you just have to find the the the milestones and where you can kind of somewhat artificially force them to coincide with the cadence that your organization is operating at, right?

Craig Stoss: 19:13

Yeah. I mean, all that seems to be is just more visibility, right? I I I you know blindly accepting a quarter and forcing something into a quarter that doesn't make sense. Yes, you know, is is probably not the right way to go for certain milestones, maybe for others it is, but um you know, I I I used to work at an e-commerce company, and and of course, preparing for uh Black Friday and Cyber Monday was was was par it was was tantamount, like you had to be prepared for that. Um, and so but measuring that in quarters doesn't really make a ton of sense, right? It's it's kind of like something that you know, you you set a deadline and it's like, what are the milestones, you know, maybe weekly or even monthly, you know, you know, applying it to something completely different, planning a wedding, you know. like yeah you have to book the venue a year in advance and the flowers and maybe music and everything you know super far in advance but you know there's probably not much to do until like the month before you don't have to find the potential spouse till like the month before exactly yeah so yeah yeah it's yeah it I think it's it's one of those things that it depends on what you're trying to to what your outcome you're going for and and why that's an outcome is is relevant to your business. And and I think that's what gets lost in a lot of of these processes, you know, because CEOs, sales executives, they think in quarters and and and rightfully or wrongfully I'm not in that business to to talk about it, but that's that's how people think you know it's it's uh there was a spoof on LinkedIn I saw kind of a it was a a salesperson spoofing the sales industry and saying that what if you know what if buying uh you know shoes um uh was was you know done like you sell software and then the person you know saw someone click on a pair of shoes on the website and and the lead popped up in Salesforce and the guy the person got the phone says well why you know why do you need shoes and and what's your timeline for buying these shoes and and what are the use cases you know and it's like you know and by the way I need to get I need to sell you these shoes by the end of quarter because I can give you a good deal if you buy it you know within the next two weeks and you know and it it really kind of exacerbated you know exaggerated sorry the um you know kind of the funny way we've come accustomed to the sales cycle anyway that's nothing to do with goals but it's amusing nonetheless I need to visit that shoe shop yeah oh thank you so much Craig this has been super interesting as always um I'm gonna thank you again for coming on at short notice and again wish you happy new year and uh wish you luck with those OKRs as well.

Charlotte Ward: 21:54

Thanks very much I appreciate it Charlotte and uh look forward to speaking again soon that's it for today go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two three three for the show notes and I'll see you next time