Notes from an on-site: Let the game come to you

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I hear people say, you have to hire for empathy. I'm like, all right, give me 10 interview questions that test for empathy. Like, it's not actually empathy that you're testing for.

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Empathy is just like an umbrella term that is meant to measure several skills. What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob here.

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He's getting comfy. What's up, Rob? Daddy's little meatball in the house. My man, JP here.

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JP, can you say hi? Hello. What? And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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Dubbed myself. We are all in the same room. This is a rare occurrence.

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This is another episode wrapping up the Customer Success Collectives CS Festival, Boston. Yes. And we've got another one in the works.

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I'm sorry, which one of you was going to talk about this? Well, I was going to talk about spaghetti. We're doing so many of these. I talked about spaghetti today.

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Spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti. So, I was talking about spaghetti. It's a reference.

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Raise your hand at home if you get that reference. Rob, what is it? I don't know. I just thought it's time to raise my hand.

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Look it up. Spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti. Yeah, my show reference.

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I don't know. Most people didn't get that. I got it.

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Which one was it? What did I say? Oh, they make wine in boxes? Oh, yeah. A few people in the room. They make wine in boxes? Yeah, yeah.

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A box of wine. Yeah, it puts me right out. All right, JP, go ahead.

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Well, there was quite a bit of... And when I say spaghetti, I'm talking about threads. You know what I mean? Oh, okay. Thank you.

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These threads, you know what I mean? But there was a lovely, lovely piece of Lady and the Tramp prime spaghetti that I was slurping on. And it has to do with empathy. Oh, my gosh.

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The word empathy. We're talking about it in customer success. You just rode your eyeballs, didn't you? I wish I had a small violin.

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You just rode your eyeballs, didn't you? I don't. But we talked about it. And actually, there was a panel.

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And one of the people on that panel was none other. Guess who it was? I'd like everybody, let's do a pause. No, okay, never mind.

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Don't even pause. I was going to say, let's do a pause to see if you could guess the least likely slash most likely to talk about empathy again. Tell them why you're the least likely.

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I mean, look, I don't know if you're a first time listener. Love you. Thank you for being here.

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Please come back. I have historically not loved the discussion of empathy within customer success. But you do love mental health.

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Love mental health. And I'm learning a very empathetic person. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that about myself.

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But anyway, finish what you were saying, please. Well, I thought that you, you know, there were some good things I thought that you were saying on that stage. And I think it would be cool for you to maybe just talk a little bit about what that was like.

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Not sitting on a panel necessarily. But talking about this topic that I think we had people in the audience who definitely wanted to hear things like more actionable. Right.

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So they didn't want to just hear like empathy in this fluffy sense of the word in the same way that people also mentioned curiosity. Right. And we always hear curiosity, but people want to hear about an actionable form of curiosity or different behaviors or tactics to drive what you would consider curiosity as a behavior in a very tangible sense.

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So it would be cool to hear about maybe some of your takeaways. You don't have to say exactly what you said on stage, but. Yeah, no.

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Well, so I was honored to be asked to speak at the event. They essentially gave me a couple of different panels that I could have sat on. Presentations I could have given.

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And the first one was empathy. I think it was a list of three or four. The first one was empathy, and I kept scrolling.

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I was like, I definitely. But I started to think about it more, and I was like, this is an opportunity to share the more nuanced way I think about empathy because I've spent a lot of time talking about it for as much as I dislike it and learn to not only coexist with it, to understand its value. But also through the lens of customer success, explain why I have a problem with the term empathy and how I might shift it a little bit that actually, I think, empowers CS people more because part of the reason I hate the term empathy is because I think it creates a belief within customer success professionals that they should feel what their customer feels that they should be at their beck and call sort of thing.

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And I think it just creates the wrong attitude around how it is you're supposed to work with your customers and often attracts the wrong type of person, which is my real concern is people get into customer success and they're like, oh, because I love helping people. And that's what I have. And I'm super empathetic.

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I used to be a teacher and I love helping people. I love educating. And those are great characteristics to have, but can be to your detriment in customer success, not always and not if you have the self-awareness to notice when it's happening.

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But that's why I was excited to be a part of it, because I wanted to maybe bring some more attention to that were possible. And so I was on the panel with a gentleman named Jitesh, last name is going to blank, but I certainly put his profile in the show notes and Alistair Methin over at Florence Health Care. Awesome guy.

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And he's the one that called out the curiosity. Yeah. Like, let's not call it empathy.

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Let's not let's think of it more as being curious about your customer, your POC, but also their colleagues, how it is they do their job every day and how it is your solution fits into that. Yeah. And asking more open ended questions and caring less about answering a yes or no question from your perspective, like trying to accomplish something and just wanting to broaden the overall picture you understand about this person's situation.

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There was something before I give you there was something that was said that I thought was really insightful. I don't know if this was you or someone else, but it said like, curiosities, don't tell me. I think it was you.

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The curiosity is don't tell me why you gave me a seven. It's like, tell me how it would have been an eight or what would have made it a six. Right.

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So yeah. So yeah. And that's I appreciate that you remembered that.

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Yeah. Hopefully that was right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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I said that. I know a guy who said that. No, and that's and that's my problem, too.

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I think the interesting thing is like none of us have a problem with empathy. We have a problem with how it's termed in our space and how it's not put into like an actionable format. Yeah.

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Right. Like I hear people say you have to hire for empathy. I'm like, all right, give me 10 interview questions that test for empathy.

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Like it's not actually empathy that you're testing for. Empathy is just like an umbrella term that is meant to measure several skills. And like those skills might be how do you handle NPS requests? And if somebody says, well, I don't.

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Or if they say like, oh, you know, I just kind of like ask them, why did you give me that score? That's not as empathetic as saying like, well, you gave us a seven. What would have made you give us an eight? Can you tell me more about that? Like that is where it becomes an actual skill. And I think the reason why I actually am most skeptical.

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I don't think that's empathy. Right. I mean, and we talked about this because you moderated the panel.

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True. True. That's not empathy.

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That's curiosity. Yeah, exactly. Right.

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Exactly. That's asking exploratory questions. That's learning how to broaden the conversation, then narrow it with those yes, no questions, those closed-ended questions.

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And you're taking the next words out of my mouth. Exactly. Which is the thing that came up that I thought was really useful is look, burnout is everywhere in our profession, especially now.

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And part of the reason for burnout is it's really hard to hear somebody say, your software, your solution is breaking my business. I bought this thing on a hope and a prayer that it would work. But guess what? It's actually making me way worse, which is often during the onboarding process.

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Like that happens, right? Change management is hard. Separate topic we can talk about. But the key thing is when we are too empathetic, we burn ourselves out.

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Psychologists practice this as well. They have to learn how to manage their own degree of empathy so that they're not overly invested in their client. Can I posit a theory here? Yeah.

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Are we suggesting that our CS professionals dissociate themselves? Maybe a little bit. I think so. Yeah.

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I think the way that we phrased it was like to sort of see the situation from the third person. So you can still see the part of you that is empathetic with the customer that relates to the customer. And you can use that part of you to relate to the customer and to use other like strategies like feel felt down that came up.

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But at the same time, you don't have to take it home with you. It doesn't have to be emotional baggage for you. And they shouldn't be either for the most.

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Like I think that's the thing is we should all be untethering ourselves emotionally from our jobs virtually. I had an epiphany on that stage in the tactical advice I gave at the end. You're talking about it's always helpful to be a little bit more tactical.

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We live in theory a lot in our conversations because I think it's helpful to be tactical. And I have difficulty with that because I think they change so often based on the scenario. Right.

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But the tactic I gave was I think why I thought I wasn't empathetic is the lead up to the tactic was because I'm so task oriented. OK, I got to get on this call and we got to figure out this problem or I've got to get on to the next step in the playbook, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And so I would dispense with any foreplay, any bedside manner, anything that was not directly tied point A to point B to get by accomplishing the task that I was looking to do.

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What I've learned and this is clear in personal relationships, too, is sometimes you got to butter them up before you do that or or, you know, sometimes they just don't want it to be so dang transactional. And so the rule I gave myself was any task I was trying to accomplish and it included another individual where I had to interface with another personality, somebody that wasn't myself in the mirror. Essentially, I should assume it will take at least twice as long as I expected to.

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So if my initial reaction is I've got to accomplish this task with this customer, a 30 minute meeting, I should actually book it for 60, because by the time we get through all of those pieces of the puzzle that build the relationship, that engender trust, that make it so they want to continue to work with you and open up to you, which are just different ways of saying what I just said, you just got to take the time. You've got to have patience, which I struggled with. And so that is my little hack is, OK, well, then if we finish early, that's fantastic.

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But I shouldn't feel like I'm I'm under the gun. Have you guys heard the phrase slow is fast and fast is slow? Sure. That's like a great application.

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Well, you actually. Well, I'm joking, I'm joking. I don't know what you're waxing off.

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Wax and butter and all kinds of stuff. All I'm saying is that what you said is useful, because what you said is really useful. Go ahead, Rob.

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Dillon, what you said is really useful, because what you said is like, OK, I've learned to accept that this is going to be part of the process. But I actually think those of us who are most efficient sometimes appear least efficient. Which is kind of interesting, because those of us who take the time to be very deliberate in understanding the situation and the person we're working with can find the exact button to push at the exact right time that moves things at a faster pace than we would have otherwise found if we just rushed it, rushed into business.

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So if my boss comes to me and it's like, what's going on? You don't look efficient. I'm going to be like, yo, I'm just very deliberate. Slow is the fastest, baby.

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Or you tell him, I'm letting the game come to me, baby. That's our time, folks. We'll catch you next time.

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You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Until next time.