Aligning CS with business goals
In theory, all projects that are conducted within a business should align with the overarching business strategy. Alignment is how a company ensures that the work being performed by employees is in service to the strategy. And while it might seem abstract to employees, good leaders will be able to describe to their teams how everything they do supports the corporate strategy. It was way back in 1997 that the late, great Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, talked about corporate strategy (https://hbr.org/1997/11/making-strategy-learning-by-doing):
Getting that mirroring right is a tricky thing. Companies that find themselves out of alignment with this mirroring can very quickly stumble and lose customers and even succumb to competitive threats because they might be perceived as being inconsistent with their production and quality of output, their delivery of service, or the quality of their customer engagement.
This is why leaders must focus relentlessly on alignment. This is also why regular meetings and conversations between levels of management and between management and individual contributors matter. Great CS leaders excel at helping the CSMs that report to them clearly understand how critical their activities are to the company’s overarching strategy, how customers have to be at the center of their work energy, and how every task they undertake has a purpose that supports that strategy. Each informs the other. The strategy provides the direction and the resource allocation, and activities provide the strategy with realism, information, and validation.
But how do leaders become great at this? They first understand that their job is not to do the job of the people reporting to them. Their job is to provide clarity of information and access to the resources and assets required by their people so that they can perform to expectations in their jobs.
Second, they understand that being a CS leader is distinct from being a leader of teams in other organizations. A CS leader must keep the customer’s desired business outcomes at the forefront of the way they lead their teams – helping customers achieve their desired business outcomes is the entire point of CS. Leaders, therefore, must be skilled in being able to see for themselves how the various processes and tactics of their team, as well as the processes and tactics of other organizations’ teams, fit together to affect the ability of the customer to achieve success. The easiest way to envision this is to imagine the CS leader as the conductor of an orchestra. Just as conductors must be knowledgeable about the sound that each of the instruments in the orchestra can produce and how each instrument can work with all the others to produce a symphony of sound, so too should a CS leader aim to produce a single coherent strategy for driving customer outcomes by coordinating and conducting the movement of all processes within the CS team. Yes, it is a lot to expect but if a CS leader is to fulfill their role as an advocate for the customer within the company, it means that its leaders have to always factor in the customers’ point of view. The best way to do that is to be keenly aware of how all the processes that run through CS affect the customer, just as a conductor is keenly aware of how the overall sound of the orchestra is perceived by members of the audience.
Third, they focus time and effort on self-improvement in the arena of skills that make great leaders. Top of the list are effective multi-directional communications and the ability to inspire and persuade through words and deeds. Also on the list are personal integrity, self-confidence, respect for others, and courage.
Collectively, these skills can help create a desirable impression that the leader is a valuable ambassador of the corporate strategy, is someone who excels at articulating how processes and activities fit into that strategy, is someone that people respect and listen to, is someone who will hold others accountable for the completion of duties as they were described and committed to, and is someone who can comfortably rally others to pour their energy into their responsibilities.
None of this is easy and much of it requires the individual leader to adopt the concept of becoming a lifetime learner.
In this section, you learned about the requirement that CS leaders be conscious of the critical role they play in ensuring a tight connection between the corporate strategy and the fine-grained details of the work performed by members of their team. You also learned that it is the responsibility of the individual contributors, the CSM, and the CS operations members (the non-customer-facing, sub-component of the CS function that focuses on refining strategy, building processes, and enabling CSMs) to do their part in ensuring that this tight connection is made. Just as every electrical circuit requires a tight connection between components, corporate strategy is meaningless if there is no tight connection with the people on the front lines doing the work.
