59: Building Leaders in Your Team with Ryan Klausner

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 59 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is building leaders in your team, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. This week I would like to welcome back a previous panel podcast guest, Ryan Klausner. Ryan, would you like to introduce yourself properly to our listeners?

Ryan Klausner: 0:43

Happy to, Charlotte, and only if I can do it properly.

Charlotte Ward: 0:46

Only properly. I only can do proper introductions.

Ryan Klausner: 0:50

That was an improper introduction. My name is Ryan Klausner. I am a customer support, customer operations, and customer success leader. I've worked in the space in a leadership capacity for uh over a decade now. I'm currently with Orion Labs. They're based in San Francisco. They're a voice-first enterprise communication platform that helps connect frontline workers and teams with AI-driven automation on our Push to Talk platform. I am responsible for both the customer support and customer success operations within our organization and happy to speak about that.

Charlotte Ward: 1:24

Thank you so much, Ryan. Um, so the topic for this week is building leaders in your team.

Ryan Klausner: 1:31

Absolutely. So from a few perspectives, I guarantee you there are several folks within your existing team who want to level up their experience and likely step into a leadership opportunity or advance their career in some capacity. But with usually rare exception, some form of leadership is part of that. I think that there's several ways of obviously approaching this, but what I have enjoyed doing and have had some success historically is making sure that I have a close rapport with my team. So, you know, aside from weekly one-on-ones with team members having some sort of quarterly review in terms of their own professional development, where do they want to go in a candid way? And I think it's really important not to keep that scope within your existing team or department. I think the biggest fear and concern we can have is to stifle our team in terms of their own professional growth. When we hire people, we should want to hire folks that are more experienced than us in certain regards, or bringing something new to the organization and something new to the team that will challenge our existing ideas, challenge our existing process, and ultimately we're going to be a stronger organization because of it. So to that extent, you know, we often do, you know, 70, 20, 10 plans for professional development. And I think that's really important to make sure that, you know, even if it's somewhat pertaining to their existing role, but part of their larger professional development, how as a leader can we best support them on that path, which will A, decrease the attrition you have within your organization, because even if they're not where they want to be today, they actually see a tangible roadmap on how they will continually evolve. And then there's all sorts of, I feel, internal leadership opportunities that really can be addressed within an organization. Let's say as a support leader or perhaps a supervisor opportunity can open up, there can be great opportunities for shadowing. So there's all of these real sort of short-term or um almost immediate opportunities to jump into a supervisor capacity in some form. One of the great ways of developing leadership, in my view, from within a support organization, and I've had some success with is leveling up that skill. So although it might not be a leadership opportunity per se, having the ability to step up into the role of, for example, a quality analysis to review calls and provide that constructive feedback. But we can also help to coach. So that's how we can start leveling up their background as a support leader. And the the uh role of uh someone in in a quality analysis role is often one that requires a lot of leadership in and of itself, even if it may not be viewed as a leadership role.

Charlotte Ward: 4:22

Yeah, yeah. I I think you're right. I think that developing leaders in our team is not only looking for opportunities for them to fully step into a leadership role. It's about finding opportunities for them to exercise some of those muscles in different ways, right? And that sometimes is something as obvious as shadowing or being mentored by an existing leader through certain situations, kind of using it as a learning opportunity. But sometimes it is just giving them the freedom to explore some different parts of the business or different roles that have a lot of crossover.

Ryan Klausner: 4:56

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a lot of opportunities to that degree. For example, if you have a team member in your organization who's interested in working more in a product-focused capacity, obviously that might not be directly pertaining to their existing role within uh CS, but there might be an opportunity for them to step up in a short-term capacity to help with product. Perhaps they could work with product uh and whoever's in charge with your voice of the customer program on aligning um some of those goals and work on a uh BOC program together. So that's something that they could end up having more sort of cross-functional benefit from and the opportunity to start getting their toes wet at the very least in a product capacity. And perhaps even just being able to attend meetings that you maybe are only open to leadership, see those conversations and get some insightful takeaways that will help them, if not immediately, but in the long-term level up, right?

Charlotte Ward: 5:55

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's that's a really interesting point that actually a big part of leadership is collaboration with other parts of the business. So providing some exposure to that, if not outright responsibility in those areas is is really a key part to understanding how you deal with that. It's easy to be a great performer, be offered some kind of team lead or management role, but then have no connection to other parts of the of the business in terms of the people there or the function or the measures of success that that operation is working to. If you have no prior exposure to that, it's a lot to pick up as well as stepping up into your leadership role in the first place. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash 59 for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.