Developing A Service-Oriented Mindset

I watched one of my CSM sit in complete silence after his first escalation last week. The fire was technically out. The bug was fixed. The "official" apology was sent. But for him, the Escalation Hangover was just beginning. If you’ve been in Customer Success long enough, you know the symptoms. You start replaying every call. You scan for every missed signal. You start asking yourself: “Could I have prevented this? Do they even trust me anymore? Am I actually good at this?” The truth is, most escalations aren't even about the CSM. They come from product gaps, messy implementations, or internal misalignment. But as the CSM, you’re the face of the recovery and that is a heavy place to stand. If you’re feeling the weight of a fire right now, here is what I told him: Facing an escalation doesn't mean you're bad at your job. It usually means you were close enough to the customer to be the person they trusted with their frustration. The real work starts now. And it isn't about pretending everything is fine. It's about rebuilding belief through three specific moves: 1. Name the mess clearly: Trust dies when you try to minimize the issue. Don't spin it. Say it: “You’re right to be frustrated. This caused a real disruption, and we should have caught it earlier.” You have to own the friction before you can remove it. 2. Prove the system learned: A resolution just answers “Is it fixed today?” A recovery answers, “Why won't it break tomorrow?” The customer doesn't just want a patch; they want proof that your internal process has evolved. Tell them exactly what changed in your communication rhythm or your internal checks so they don't have to stay on guard. 3. Lean into "Boring" Consistency: You don't win back trust with one hero call. You win it back during the quiet, boring weeks that follow. It’s the update that arrives exactly when you promised. It’s the risk you flag two weeks before it becomes a problem. It’s being visible when things are calm, not just when the building is on fire. Escalations are uncomfortable, messy, and sometimes completely unfair. They can shake even the most experienced person. But remember: You don't build deep partnerships when things are easy. You build them in the recovery. You didn’t just fix a bug; you just proved you’re the person who stays in the room when it gets hot. Stop looking for the exit and start looking at the foundation, it’s usually stronger after the fire.

8D PROBLEM SOLVING EXAMPLE FORMAT AND EXAMPLE: PROBLEM: Surface Scratches on Painted Parts D1 – Team Formation Formed a cross-functional team with members from Quality, Production, Paint Shop, and Maintenance. D2 – Problem Description Issue: Surface scratches on final painted parts. Location: Paint Shop – Final Inspection Area. Timing: Observed consistently over the past 3 days. Magnitude: Rejection rate increased to 15% (standard is <2%). Impact: Increased rework and delayed customer shipments. D3 – Interim Containment Action Isolated all painted parts for 100% visual inspection. Reworked all affected parts before dispatch. Instructed operators to wear gloves when handling painted components. D4 – Root Cause Analysis Scratches caused by burrs on metal hanging hooks in the conveyor system. No preventive maintenance schedule existed for hook inspection. Root Cause: Worn-out, unmaintained hooks with sharp edges. D5 – Permanent Corrective Action Replaced all burr-marked hooks with new, smooth-surfaced ones. Introduced a weekly checklist for hook inspection and maintenance. D6 – Implementation and Validation Actions implemented across all 3 shifts. Post-implementation, rejection rate dropped from 15% to 1.2% in 2 weeks. Effectiveness validated through quality audits and data analysis. D7 – Prevent Recurrence SOP updated to include hook inspection procedure. Conducted training for all Paint Shop and maintenance staff. Hook audit added to monthly quality schedule. D8 – Team Recognition Appreciation email sent by Quality Head. Team recognized during the monthly Quality Circle meeting.

What does empathy look like in leadership? Last night I sat in an after-hours clinic until 10 p.m. The place was filled with tired parents and restless children as winter illnesses spread across New Zealand. The wait was long, yet the clinic stayed calm. Two nurses worked with precision, and three doctors kept a steady rhythm from room to room. One nurse knelt to a child’s eye level to explain the delay. Another placed a cup of water in a worried mother’s hands without a word. They stayed late so everyone was seen. I was one of the last to be seen, but that is ok because kids deserve to be seen first. Year after year our health system face staff shortages and limited resources. Yet medical staff do their best to make a difference. Last night was a quiet masterclass in empathy, not as a PR slogan to "be kind," but as the culture of showing up when people need you. Then there’s the moment in this clip when Juan Martín del Potro pauses a tennis match so that an injured ball girl can be comforted and replaced. No glory and no extra point for his sportsmanship. Just presence and empathy under pressure. Virtue signaling posts values on a wall and calls it done. Real empathy, by contrast, seeks no recognition and genuinely serves others. The people on my team have families. If work wins and home loses, we all lose. The community pays first, and the business pays later. So, here are my 5 simple tips on how you can lead with empathy: 1. Ask real questions: ⇀ What really matters this month? ⇀ What would make work better? 2. Set humane rules: ⇀ Name the top three priorities. ⇀ No stealth weekend work. 3. Be present in hard moments: ⇀ Have the tough conversations early. ⇀ Support your team in public. 4. Share the load: ⇀ Move deadlines and reassign work. ⇀ Cover a shift. 5. Measure what matters: ⇀ Track energy, trust, and safety. ⇀ Let those guide decisions. Empathy is how we show up for each other, week after week - whether it's for our teams, families, or communities. How has empathy shaped the way you lead, or the way you’ve been led? ------- ➕ Follow Jonathan Maharaj FCPA for finance‑leadership clarity. 🔄 Share this insight with a decision‑maker. 📰 Get deeper breakdowns in Financial Freedom, my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gYHdNYzj 📆 Ready to work together? Book your Clarity Session: https://lnkd.in/gyiqCWV2

As organizations strive for excellence, the challenge often lies not in making improvements, but in maintaining them. Once we achieve a certain level of quality or efficiency, how do we ensure these standards continue to be met, or even surpassed, over time? This is where the role of management systems needs to be understood. A robust management system is crucial for sustaining improvements. It's not just about the changes we implement, but how we embed them into our daily, weekly, and monthly routines. Annual reviews play a vital role, but the essence of sustaining improvements lies in the regular, smaller checks – those daily and weekly habits that keep us on track. 👉 Daily Gemba walks and check-ins or "huddles" can help teams stay aligned with their goals and quickly address any deviations. Adopting 2 Second Lean can help drive small everyday incremental improvements. (See previous posts on these topics and I also recommend Paul Akers book "2 Second Lean"). 👉 Weekly team meetings and cross-departmental process review meetings are key to increasing and sustaining improvements. These are most effective when they include a focus on not just planning but also performance metrics, reviews and lessons learned. Don't forget about 1:1's either- it's important to have regular individual check-ins. 👉 Monthly and bi-monthly evaluations provide opportunity for a comprehensive review of processes and a look at longer-term trends and effects. Regular Kaizen events ensure everyone is involved in CI discussions, process mapping, root- cause analysis and decision-making. In addition to this, it's important to offer ongoing training in your chosen quality management methodology. 👉 Annual reviews and audits are crucial for a deep dive into the year's performance, reassessing objectives, and setting new goals. I also recommend including an organizational health check at least once a year, and including succession planning in the strategic focus. Every organization has responsibility for setting up management systems. They are structured activities that everyone must be aware of and involved in. Each organization's management systems may look different, and that's ok! It is evident that leaders plays a pivotal role in this process. Managers and leaders need to be vigilant, proactive, and adaptable. They are responsible for fostering a culture of continuous improvement, where feedback is encouraged and acted upon. Maintaining high standards is a dynamic process. It requires a combination of robust management systems, consistent practices, strong leadership, and the integration of methodologies like Lean and Agile. By focusing on these elements, organizations can not only achieve excellence but sustain it in the long run. #continuousimprovement #lean #leanmanagement #agilemethodologies #managementsystem #leadership #management

4 loops beat 2, and here's why: Inner and outer loops were fine for 2005. They fix incidents, they close tickets, and they make dashboards look super busy. They also cap your upside and make you measure the wrong thing (e.g., problem solved vs. email delivered). I have seen “closed the loop” everywhere while revenue still leaked and costs kept rising. It's also a dated philosophy that too many push and isn't helping you create long-term customer value. First, some definitions: The inner loop is direct recovery with one customer after a bad moment. The outer loop is fixing the root cause. Useful, but mostly reactive. We cannot solve tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s control loops. Now, let's modernize the stack a bit, shall we? 1. Recovery loop is 1-to-1 service recovery from any signal, not just surveys. 2. Removal loop is a two-week sprint eliminating the defect and verifying it's gone. 3. Orchestration loop is turning customer signals into the next-best-action for growth and efficiency across flows and channels. 4. Learning loop is the write-back of outcomes so models, rules, and playbooks get smarter, and corporate debt like tech debt gets cut. Closing the loop is a receipt. Compounding the loop is a result. This only works when leaders run it together: CX develops the priority and the value lens from the customer's perspective. Product and Engineering own removal with a real backlog and delivery dates. Sales and Marketing run orchestration so the right accounts get the right nudge or education at the right time. Service and Customer Success lead recovery with clear SLAs and authority to make it right. Data brings the signals together with field level controls. Finance verifies lift and keeps us honest. Legal and Risk set boundaries that protect customers and the brand. You hold a bi-weekly value standup to review prioritization for value at risk and value unlocked. Put it on one page with the owners named. Additionally, have a monthly review with Finance & Executives to greenlight bigger system changes only when the value story is clear. You want to focus on throughput here. Here's a concrete example. A commercial payments portal sees Friday 3 p.m. file upload failures spike. Recovery loop fixes impacted clients within an hour and credits fees where needed. The Removal loop delivers a batch size fix and a clearer progress widget within two sprints. The Orchestration loop sends a short in-app guide on Thursdays to high-risk users and alerts bankers for top accounts. The Learning loop shows failures down 62 percent, Friday contacts down 35 percent, and three at-risk clients adopting premium file services within a month. That is compounding value. Comment 1, 2, 3, or 4 with the loop your team is missing and the single constraint blocking it. Type "Fix the Loop" below, and I will share a Google Doc checklist you can steal for your team. #customerexperience #productmanagement #sales #engineering

In healthcare—and in life—good intentions aren’t enough. A group of seminary students prepares to give talks on compassion—some on the Good Samaritan. On their way to the lecture hall, they pass someone in visible distress. Surely, their moral training would guide them to stop. Right? The study found something unsettling: If they were in a hurry, they were far less likely to help—regardless of how much they valued compassion. This reveals something profound. Context shapes behavior—not in a rigid way, but enough to influence whether we respond with empathy or walk by. Now think about healthcare. Most clinicians enter the field with a deep desire to care. But like the students, our ability to act on that intention is shaped by their environment: 🚨 Long shifts 📋 Endless documentation 🏥 Understaffing 💔 Emotional overload Over time, many experience empathic distress—the toll of witnessing suffering without adequate support. Some detach to cope. Others find compassion satisfaction—a sense of meaning that sustains them. Here’s the heart of it: Clinicians don’t burn out because they lack compassion. They struggle when systems make it nearly impossible to live it out. Even the most empathic hearts falter in environments that reward speed over presence, output over connection. And yet, people vary—strengths and coping styles make a difference. What helps? To preserve empathy, we must create spaces where care can breathe: • Time to Care – Like the students in the low-hurry group, clinicians need room to connect. • Psychological Safety – A culture where emotions can be shared without fear. • Better Systems – Workflows that reduce burden and protect humanity. • Individual Support – Because no two people handle stress the same way. Compassion isn’t simply a personal trait. It’s a shared resource—one that systems can either nourish or deplete. If we truly value empathy in healthcare, we must design for it—while honoring the diverse ways providers stay connected to their purpose. What combination of systemic and individual support do you believe makes the biggest difference? I’d love to hear from those on the front lines—and those shaping the future of care. #JustOneHeart #Healthcare #Compassion #BurnoutPrevention #PsychologicalSafety #Empathy #PatientExperience

Most talent acquisition operating models split cleanly into two layers: delivery and enablement. But here is the honest truth that most leaders avoid saying aloud: we keep trying to force every single recruiter to be a consultative, data-fluent strategist while simultaneously expecting them to crush a massive requisition load. The reality is that strategy becomes a byproduct of whoever has spare bandwidth, meaning it rarely happens at all. When we looked at how Blair Bennett, SVP of Global TA at PepsiCo, manages a 500-person organization for a $90 billion enterprise, we found a completely different architecture. She introduced a dedicated, centralized Strategy pillar with its own headcount, formalizing a product management lifecycle for how talent acquisition actually builds capabilities and senses future market shifts. Instead of trying to upskill every recruiter into an all-knowing strategic advisor, this model compartmentalizes strategy into a specialized group that handles talent intelligence, portfolio ROI, and workforce scenario modeling. The recruiters in the execution layer are then armed with the exact upstream tools and insights they need, transforming intake meetings from frantic guessing games into strategy-informed conversations. In this week’s newsletter, I break down PepsiCo's formalized value chain and look closely at their Talent Foresights team, a group explicitly tasked with task decomposition and mapping what human recruiting looks like alongside AI agents. If your current strategy function is just a secondary title tacked onto a leader's overpacked schedule, your team is building for today's urgency rather than tomorrow's transformation. 👇 Read the full breakdown of this operating model by following the link below.

How GCC Leaders Can Improve Work Execution to Drive Employee Experience, Productivity, and Quality Most GCCs focus on scaling operations and cost efficiencies, but the best leaders go beyond that. They rethink how work gets done—removing inefficiencies, empowering employees, and ensuring quality outcomes. Here’s what truly moves the needle: 1. Fix Process Inefficiencies and Automate the Obvious Too many GCCs still replicate HQ processes instead of optimizing for agility. Identify bottlenecks, eliminate redundant approvals, and automate manual tasks—especially in IT, HR, and finance. Workflow automation can cut task times in half. 2. Align Teams Across Time Zones with Outcome-Based Execution Global teams struggle with coordination, leading to handover gaps and rework. Instead of micromanaging, real-time dashboards, and clear outcome ownership. Focus on customer impacting outcomes not effort. 3. Empower Employees with the Right Tools and Autonomy A poor employee experience leads to low engagement and productivity loss. Give teams self-service analytics, knowledge bases, and low-code/no-code tools to solve problems independently. Cut meeting overload and encourage deep work time. 4. Prioritize Learning, Growth, and Cross-Functional Expertise GCCs shouldn’t just execute work—they should drive innovation. Invest in technical upskilling, global mobility programs, and leadership rotations to create a future-ready workforce. 5. Governance Without Bureaucracy Traditional governance models slow down execution. Instead of rigid top-down approvals, implement agile decision-making frameworks and RACI models that balance control with speed. GCC leaders must shift from process execution to work transformation—optimizing workflows, leveraging AI, and making employee experience a top priority. The results can be significant: • 15-30% productivity gains by automating and streamlining workflows. • 10-25% cost savings through elimination of reduntang processes, process efficiencies and automation. • 20-40% improvement in employee engagement by reducing friction in daily work. • 20-50% faster execution of key projects by reducing delays and dependencies. • 25-50% fewer errors through improved governance and automation.

Customer service can indeed be a challenging role, often leading to frustration for both the service provider and the customer. However, with the right approach and mindset, it can be transformed into a pleasant and genuinely productive experience. Here are some strategies to make that happen: 1. Active Listening: This is crucial. Pay close attention to what the customer is saying, and acknowledge their concerns. This helps in understanding the issue better and also makes the customer feel heard and valued. 2. Empathy and Understanding: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Responding with empathy can diffuse tension and build a connection, leading to more constructive interactions. 3. Clear Communication: Use simple, jargon-free language. Clear communication reduces misunderstandings and makes solutions more accessible. 4. Patience: Sometimes, customers might be upset or confused. Exhibiting patience can calm a heated situation and lead to better problem-solving. 5. Positive Attitude: A positive demeanor can set the tone for the entire interaction. Even in challenging situations, a positive approach can lead to more satisfactory outcomes. 6. Knowledge and Resources: Be well-informed about your product or service. This instills confidence in the customer and enables you to provide accurate and helpful information. 7. Feedback Implementation: Take customer feedback seriously. It’s a goldmine for improving service quality and shows customers that their opinions are valued. 8. Follow-up: A follow-up after resolving an issue can leave a lasting positive impression. It shows dedication and commitment to customer satisfaction. By integrating these practices into everyday customer service interactions, not only can the job become more enjoyable, but it also paves the way for building lasting customer relationships and a positive brand image.

Empathy is the Heart of Leadership In sound organizations, leaders are measured by results—profit margins, performance metrics, and organizational achievements. But behind every one of those numbers is a person, a story, and a need to be understood. That’s why I believe empathy is not just a skill but the foundation of effective leadership. I remember a time when a team member was struggling both professionally and personally. Their performance had slipped, and it would’ve been easy to focus solely on the results. Instead, I chose to meet with them—not to point out what wasn’t working but to ask, “How are you?” That simple question led to an honest conversation where I learned about challenges they were facing outside of work. I partnered with their HR Director, and together we developed a plan to provide the support they needed. Over time, they not only rebounded but became one of the strongest performers on the team. Empathy doesn’t mean avoiding accountability; it means understanding the whole picture so we can guide people effectively. It’s about leading with humanity, recognizing struggles, and working together toward solutions. The most successful teams thrive when leaders create an environment of trust and care. Empathy fuels connection, drives collaboration, and ultimately leads to results that are not just good for business but good for people too. As we navigate challenges in our organizations and industries, let’s remember that leading with empathy is not a soft skill—it’s a strategic advantage. #Leadership #Empathy #Inclusion #ServantLeadership #Teamwork #Hospitality