Customer service and support leaders often struggle to advance their careers because they don't take advantage of a core group of allies for coaching, sponsorship, and mentoring. Today you can learn how to identify, assess, and activate core alliance relationships for greater executive success, whether you are currently a customer service and support leader or if you want to make that shift into a leadership position.
To find an opportunity, whether it's a new business venture or something that will expand your career, you must find the right people and establish and maintain successful relationships with them. However, to succeed, you need a mutually beneficial relationship that sharpens your strengths and identifies and improves your deficiencies. You need an alliance that benefits both parties.
Here are three ways service and support leaders can achieve their goals:
- Investing in alliances with an intentionally diverse set of leaders, peers and others who can provide expertise, coaching, and sponsorship.
- Being disciplined in making relationship activation a top priority.
- Focusing on what is described as the critical few.
Begin with your goals
Ninety-two percent of surveyed heads of service and support state they want to either expand their current roles or switch to superior roles. One key way to achieve this outcome is to expand your network.
By forming new alliance relationships, you can help improve your skill set and influence:
- Career opportunities: CXOs often own the opportunities to impact business growth and success. Service and support leaders must have strong relationships with the right leaders from other functions or business units to get on their teams.
- Deliver on accountabilities: Service and support leaders who effectively lead the business initiatives under their purviews today will likely get an opportunity to lead companywide business initiatives. They need to learn fast, develop plans, and organize teams beyond service and support. The right alliances will help quickly identify team members and create plans to achieve business outcomes.
- Executive leadership strengths: Many executives lack objective voices and perspectives, leaving them feeling lonely. This can contribute to career stagnation and missed opportunities.
Classify and Assess Your Alliances
Building alliances should be a high priority—a continuous effort not left to chance. Service and support leaders need to classify each alliance in terms of the support they will need from others and what they can give. Reciprocity is an essential part of a strong relationship for each alliance. There are five critical forms of support to promote service and support leaders' personal well-being.
- Sponsorship
- Coaching
- Mavenship
- Motivation
- Guardianship
Sponsorship
What you need: Service and support leaders need senior colleagues who will use their standing in the organization and their political capital to support and promote them to others. Sponsors are people who support you and represent you in meetings. They speak up and out so other key stakeholders see your value.
What you can give: Equally important is that you support your sponsors. Your efforts will reflect on them. As you pursue new opportunities and execute challenging efforts, you need to keep your sponsors informed. You should also try to become a sponsor for others. If you can support a peer or a leader further up or down in the ranks, try to do so.
Coaching
What you need: Executive leadership is a complicated playing field, and service and support leaders must have successful playbooks. They must know how to find and get talent onto their team and into the game. Coaches are colleagues with whom you can safely consult and who provide sense, help you develop your executive playbook, and help you prepare for critical interactions.
What you can give: You should seek to become a coach of others. You can build alliances by acting as a coach to another peer or even a more senior executive. By supporting others, you can become a part of that leader's core alliances and develop a strong connection that can ultimately provide new opportunities.
Mavenship
What you need: Being a maven (one who is experienced or knowledgeable) or expert requires service and support leaders to acquire ever-expanding business knowledge, technical expertise, and leadership strengths. They need reliable and accessible sources of unique knowledge, data, and insights.
What you can give: Part of what you can give to your mavens is recognition and credit. If you gathered information from them, crediting them extends their reputation as a maven and makes them more willing to continue to share information with you. Equally important, you must seek to become a trusted expert of senior leaders and peers.
Motivation
What you need: Senior leadership is tough work, and service and support leaders will encounter daunting challenges. There will be setbacks and even outright failure. Everyone needs sources of energy—people who believe in them, encourage them, and help build confidence.
What you can give: You can serve as a motivator to other leaders. When working with sponsors, coaches, or even experts, explore what these other leaders seek to accomplish and encourage and support their efforts.
Guardianship
What you need: Executive work is not routine, and service and support leaders can become consumed with work and career ambitions. These leaders need friends and family who will encourage work/life balance, listen to their troubles, and keep them on a healthy path.
What you can give: Proving guardianship to leaders and peers is not always possible. The key is to have strong relationships where you have demonstrated your affinity to them as leaders and individuals. If they have given you signals that they want your candid, direct input, then you can provide it.
Target the Right Alliances
In many cases, one relationship with the right person can provide many needed capabilities. Your sponsor might also be your coach, and your coach might also be a great source of expertise. The key is ensuring you have a set of alliances that collectively provide all the support you need. Having a great source of expertise without a great sponsor won't enable your long-term success.
Map your existing relationships to the five types of support described earlier and answer this question: Do I have alliances to provide every form of support I need to reach my ambitions and achieve my goals?
Rebalance Your Relationship Core
You only have so many hours in the day, so investing wisely in alliance development and cultivation is critical. The key to success is not to seek volumes of connections but to focus on the critical few. If you are overly active and establish many connections, you might spend too much time maintaining weak connections.
A common trap for service and support leaders is investing too much time in developing service expert relationships and not enough time in developing relationships with business subject experts who provide objective feedback. You don't have to eliminate duplicative relationships if the relationships are healthy. Still, you do need to intentionally reduce your investment of time on them so you have more time to invest in more important ones.
Activate Your Alliances
Alliances are extremely organic. They require interaction and exchange to remain healthy and strong. Service and support leaders should activate their alliances by spending mutually beneficial time together, seeking to find and create value. The most powerful aspect of alliance success is reciprocity. In every interaction, prepare for and always bring something your alliance partner values. Successful service and support leaders relentlessly seek ways to give value to those in their core alliances.
Not activating your network with discipline and regularity can lead to atrophy. Relationships are similar to muscles; they are the most healthy when you use them after ensuring they have the proper nutrients. Here are some recommended actions:
- Schedule time to cultivate the relationships you need most so they are healthy and provide value.
- Schedule time to strengthen the bond where connections are weak. Focus on what you can deliver to them to strengthen the connection.
- Schedule time to engage and offer greater support for relationships in which you play a key role in the core network of others but are not delivering full potential.
- Keep track of all interactions that have consequences for your core relationships. Use this information to review when and for what you used your relationships.
- Bring something of value to exchange.
- Organize an act of gratitude immediately as you activate a connection and receive a benefit and seek ways to deliver it publicly.
Building alliances is key to expanding service support leaders' influence, executive growth, and advancement opportunities. Executing the recommended actions in this research will take time and energy. Successful service and support leaders have indicated that the return on investment is significant. And this is one investment where success will lead to even greater success. Every alliance will help you build and activate your other partnerships.
Brian Weber, a director analyst, and Deborah Alvord, a vice president analyst, both support the Gartner Customer Service & Support Practice, focusing on customer experience and other service leaders in the areas of customer service and support executive leadership, customer experience, and contact center operations.