Run to the fire

When I thought about the title for this post, I was thinking about a core value that, I believe, is pivotal to the effectiveness of Professional Services and Customer Success organizations.

Run to the fire.

When there’s a fire, the common wisdom is to run away.

Don’t do that.

The fire is a metaphor. For problems, escalations, and tasks we don’t want to do (because they’re hard, unpleasant, time consuming, or boring).

If you run to the fire, you should not run slowly. You have to sprint. There’s no time to waste.

Perform the task today. Handle the escalation today. Review the long document today.
Have the difficult conversation with a customer or a team member today. Do the debrief on the important customer call today. The list goes on and on.

As a Professional Services or Customer Success leader, when you communicate with your team and discuss current challenges and outstanding tasks, it’s a good opportunity to bring the “run to the fire” value into the conversation.

Urgency and speed are key to success. Otherwise, there will always be an excuse why goals were not reached, why KPIs were not met, why an initiative was not launched, why an escalation has not been addressed in time.

When communicating this value consistently, and demonstrating “running to the fire” in your actions as a leader, there is a good chance that over time, it will be part of your organization’s DNA.

When this happens, phrases like “It’s not my job to do <x>”, “I didn’t sign up for this task” , “have someone else do this task”, “I don’t want to do it” will become rarer and rarer.

And then…. you have a world class Customer Success and Professional Services team. And the team will know it too.