6 Ways to Lead When Everything Is Changing

Service is changing at a frantic, dizzying pace. It can be hard to keep up. Not only that, but it’s keeping a lot of us up at night, as we collectively wonder at 3:17 a.m., “How are we going to lead our team through all these changes?”

During a panel discussion at HDI’s Service & Support World, Nate Brown of CX Accelerator, Lee Kemp of PCNA, Phil Verghis of The Verghis Group and Mary Cook, MBA of Slalom didn’t sugarcoat what’s happening in our industry. The change is real, it’s relentless and it’s not slowing down. But they had some hard-won, practical advice for anyone trying to lead through it.

Let’s take a look:

Redefine what “service” means

Before you can lead through convergence, you have to understand what you’re converging toward.

“Service is not just contact center, customer success or customer service,” Kemp says. “Service is how you deliver to your customer. When your organization embraces that, and sees the problems of the business as an entire customer experience challenge, you’re really able to dig into something.”

The org chart is slowly catching up to this reality. Departments that used to operate in silos (marketing, IT, operations, etc.) are being asked to work together in ways they never have. The customer has always seen one company. Now the company has to start acting like one.

“Departments are trying to figure out how to work better with each other,” Cook says. “Enterprise customers look at us and see one company. They don’t care that IT is separate from marketing. They don’t care that operations is separate from technology. The gap between those departments? Customers are feeling it.”

Stop doing two jobs

“Everyone has two jobs,” Verghis says. “The first job is what you’re paid for. The second job is that awful job of doing all the workarounds to make up for the fact that you don’t have the right things to do your first job.”

You know what he’s talking about: the overhead, the escalations, the handoffs that happen because systems don’t talk to each other and teams don’t share a common view of the customer. Good leadership, Verghis says, is about eliminating that second job entirely. Your role is to make it simple, even joyful, for your team to do the right thing the first time.

“When your work moves across streams, across another group, you silently hurt the customer,” Verghis says. “Helping the customer becomes difficult because you don’t have a common view of who they are. Every time you make a decision, look at it through the lens of customer effort. What are you doing and how does it impact the customer? Then, look at the employee effort. Are you making someone else’s life miserable just so your number looks right?”

Think of yourself as a Chief Growth Officer

Whatever your title says on LinkedIn, Kemp wants you to reframe it.

“Regardless of what your title is, regardless of what level you are, your job is to deliver growth,” Kemp says. “You have to have that mindset. It has got to be urgent.”

What does that urgency look like in practice? Kemp says stop waiting for the 12-, 24- or 36-month project to prove your value. Macroeconomic conditions change. Budgets shift. The next disruption is always around the corner.

“You’ve got to focus on ‘how do I deliver value now, so that I have the credibility to get the bigger things done later,’” Kemp says. “That’s how you earn the right to make change at scale.”

If you want to build the kind of team that can keep delivering value without you solving every problem, take a cue from Kemp. He spends 70% of his week in one-on-ones focused on people development.

“You need to free yourself from the burden of trying to fix everything yourself,” Kemp says. “Develop your future leaders so they’re making the decisions and not waiting on you to make them.”

Stop cutting the change management budget

Raise your hand if your organization has ever been through an ERP conversion. Now keep it up if change management was the first line item cut from that budget. Hand still up? We thought so.

“What’s the first thing you always cut when you’re going through a massive technical transformation?” Kemp asks. “Change management. ‘Oh, the leaders can handle that. They can write the communications.’ But they can’t. And it ends up costing you so much.”

The irony: The bigger the transformation, the more likely an organization is to skip what makes transformation stick. Kemp’s point is that when you’re thorough about change management, you can deliver a great outcome for the customer, despite the chaos underneath.

Build trust before you build anything with AI

“We need AI!” Cook hears it constantly from enterprise clients. And she’s not saying they’re wrong, but doesn’t think all of them are ready for it.

“If you don’t have governance in place first, you’re never going to make it,” Cook says. “You have to have the rails down before you send the train out.”

Before any AI implementation, Cook insists clients do two things: clean the data and update the knowledge base. Without those foundations, she says, AI doesn’t work in any meaningful way.

Listen to your team

Convergence starts with conversations, not PowerPoint presentations. It’s all about communicating with the people within your organization about what you are trying to change, what you are trying to lead and what you are trying to converge.

A practical tip from Cook: Befriend your CIO.

“Call your CIO before you need something and invite them out for coffee or lunch,” Cook says. “Build the relationship when the stakes are low, so you have credibility when they aren’t.”

And if you don’t know how to open any difficult cross-functional relationship, Kemp has four words that tend to work every time: How can I help?

“It changes the conversation,” Kemp says. “Even with the most difficult colleague, when you ask that question, you earn credibility. Then later, when you have to push for something they really don’t want to do, you’ve already built the trust to have that conversation.”