Team Success

Business is relationship driven, and a team is simply a smaller version of this premise, and for Customer Success leaders and their teams this is particularly relevant.

Networking with peers, colleagues, clients and professional organizations builds the relationships needed to succeed in a customer success context.

But to merely view your team as a collection of individuals who need to be molded into a cohesive unit is a fundamentally flawed approach.

One that is unlikely to succeed but also ignores the team members skills and talents.

But, what actually is a Team?

Your first thought may be “a group of individuals recruited form different organizations, departments or other teams, to meet various performance targets, developed by the leadership group’.

Well, yes, factually you are correct, but to create your ‘productive team culture’, I think a more nuanced approach may be needed.

Each team member brings their own cultural hinterland, and this needs to be acknowledged (and celebrated).

For example one team member may have been raised in a community where too much eye contact was seen as confrontational or disrespectful to people in authority.

Conversely, in the modern business environment, the same facial cue generally precipitates negative inferences about the person whose eyes are averted.

Team members who may feel constrained by their cultural traditions to speak too highly of themselves, may not be rewarded with bonuses or advancement, losing opportunities to colleagues who, unconstrained by custom, feel comfortable enumerating their achievements.

For the successful CS leader, it is possible—and necessary, to understand, and empathize with your team’s diverse cultural values, while encouraging, and demonstrating the behaviors needed to succeed professionally. 

And in doing so, promote your unique weltanschauung (world view) and leverage it to embed in your team’s DNA, becoming an advantage you, and your team and an asset to your client.

We’ll start with the Melting Pot.

E Pluribus Unum – the Ethos of a Melting Pot

The melting pot theory of diversity propagates a construct of diversity as monoculturalism, where the various groups are assimilated into one culture, often with the minority groups rejected or hiding their differences and unique attributes, to take on the characteristics of the dominant culture. 

Summary

I’ve heard diversity and multiculturalism described both as a melting pot and a salad bowl. Everything blends together in a melting pot while, in a salad bowl, each ingredient retains its own character but works well with everything else. I prefer the idea of the salad bowl. It is important to know yourself, your own value and your unique strengths, and bring them deliberately to your organization and clients. In doing so, challenge yourself to distinguish between your cultural mores and some of the habits they may have given rise to. Don’t let the latter constrain you from realizing your aspirations and the value you bring to others, but hold on to the former. They make us who we are.