Prevent Initiative Fatigue

Why Read: Learn how to balance productivity with team well-being, avoid burnout, and effectively prioritize initiatives. It provides crucial insights for sustainable growth and team management.

Featuring: Admired Leadership (@AdmiredLeaders), a development program focused on leadership behaviors that create loyal followership & results.

Link to Article: “Preventing Initiative Fatigue”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding Initiative Fatigue:

  • Point: Recognize that constant pressure to deliver on multiple high-priority initiatives can lead to team burnout.

  • "When burdened by too many balls in the air, the pride and sense of accomplishment team members feel when highly productive soon are replaced by an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. Under the continual pressure to perform, team members lose interest in the work and soon become less effective."

• Identifying the Real Problem:

  • Point: Realize that the issue is not the number of initiatives, but rather how many are labeled as high priority.

  • "But the reality is that the number of initiatives is not the real problem. Leaders who inadvertently burn out their teams generally do not have too many initiatives. They have too many priorities."

• Setting Clear Priorities:

  • Point: Clearly communicate which initiatives are top priority to prevent overwhelming the team.

  • "Leaders who believe that a sense of urgency and priority for all initiatives is how to get more done will soon find a team fatigued and exhausted. Instead, giving a team a healthy list of initiatives to move the organization forward but declaring which project has the highest priority is what good leaders do."

• Limiting High-Priority Initiatives:

  • Point: Keep the number of high-priority initiatives manageable to prevent team fatigue.

  • "Does everyone on your team know which initiatives are of the highest priority? If you can't count the most important initiatives on one hand, you're setting the team up for fatigue and eventual failure."

• Balancing Ambition with Team Well-being:

  • Point: Strive for productivity without overwhelming your team with constant pressure.

  • "Ambitious leaders often push their teams to get a lot done. They introduce an ongoing number of initiatives and projects to sustain and grow the organization. As the team accomplishes a never-ending list of new tasks and initiatives, productivity soars. Other leaders want to know how the team gets so much done so quickly. The organization prospers as the team repeatedly delivers better results. Sounds like a leadership dream come true. But if leaders never take their foot off the gas, the team can begin to suffer."

Lessons From Going to Market

Why Read: A startup founder should read this article to learn how to structure customer-facing teams, optimize workflows, and strategically implement service charges as the company scales. It provides valuable insights for improving customer success and retention.

Featuring: Paul Mander (@PaulMand), General Manager at Optery

Link: “Lessons from going to market with the Solutions team at mParticle“

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• When To Separate Pre-Sales And Post-Sales Functions:

  • Point: For complex products, separate pre-sales and post-sales functions to ensure optimal performance and avoid burnout.

  • "Conversely, if your product has a lot of technical complexity and/or requires a lot of work on either your or your customer's side to implement, you will eventually need to carve out your pre-sales from your post sales solutions function. The level of depth required on both sides will require dedicated experts, else your solutions team will underperform and burn out due to high volumes of context switching between pre and post sales motions."

• Developing a Commercially Focused Customer Success Team:

  • Point: Avoid letting Customer Success become a catch-all function; instead, focus on commercial metrics like Net Dollar Retention.

  • "There is no longer an appetite for CS functions that lack a commercial focus and don't own metrics such as Net Dollar Retention (NDR)."

  • "It's common for SaaS companies to put more attention on growth (the sales team) and the product (product and engineering teams) than on how the day to day with their customers operates. It's that inertia that can lead to CS becoming the catch all for things that slipped through the cracks."

• Optimizing Customer Support Workflows:

  • Point: Create a RACI model to route customer queries efficiently and guide hiring and product roadmaps.

  • "We were able to get past this inertia by getting our CS, Solutions, and Product teams together to go deep into what our customers do with our platform and how they do it. We went into what they were looking to accomplish, how they can accomplish those things, and what sort of support was needed. The result was a RACI that described how all customer queries were handled and by who."

• Strategically Implementing Service Charges:

  • Point: Initially avoid charging for services, then transition to charging for implementation when certain conditions are met.

  • "Generally, in the very early stages, you want to avoid charging customers for services. Your focus should be on understanding what drives customer adoption and how you can minimize customers' time to value. Eventually, you will want to charge customers for services if possible."

  • "We knew it was time to transition to charging for implementation services when the following pieces were in place: A repeatable sales motion, A strong understanding of what a good implementation looks like, Polished, value driving implementation process artifacts"

• Leveraging Expertise for Additional Services:

  • Point: Consider offering specialized services that leverage your team's expertise to create additional value and stickiness.

  • "Given that our product sat at the center of marketers' infrastructure, our solutions team members were world class experts in how data traversed the mar-tech ecosystem. This created demand and allowed us to charge for technical account management services, where we helped our customers understand and implement the right type and technical format of data to drive marketing use cases in various tools. More important than the actual service revenue, was the additional stickiness the expert services provided for the platform."