The #leadership channel on Support Driven has been pretty active, with quite a few conversations focused on hiring, onboarding, planning additional support hiring for a busy holiday season, and resources to help new and aspiring support managers learn and grow in their role.
Here’s a quick overview.
Interview questions
To get the ball rolling, Niro asked for examples of good interview questions for a Customer Success Manager position, and the community delivered!!
Some of my favorites were:
Also included were links to articles covering the same topic. Check them out below:
- Customer Success Interview Questions
- Essential Customer Success Interview Questions
- After giving 1000 interviews I found the 4 questions that actually matter
Team onboarding
A one-person support team hiring multiple support team members very soon needed some help with crafting an onboarding plan.
The community jumped to her aid with some ideas including creating or adding to an existing knowledge base, creating a list of questions they want the team members to answer and working backwards from there, and making sure to document each step for the next onboarding cycle.
One detailed response included using a Trello board and laying it all out by weeks:
Hiring model for holiday staffing
Are you ready for some support math wizardry? Amy asked how to create a model to help determine staffing needs for the holiday season, and the support math aficionados came out of hiding to lay some knowledge down. Tighten your belts now!
This is a skill I would love to work on, so if you’re like me, take a look at these suggestions and reach out to any of these leaders in Support Driven. They’d be happy to chat!
Reading Resources for new managers
Colin and a few other Support Driven members were looking for reading recommendations for new managers.
There were so many suggestions that I’m just going to link them here for you. :)
- Radical Candor
- Nonviolent Communication (The lovely Sarah Betts shared a review of this book on Support Driven)
- Leading Change
- Buy In
- High Output Management
- Thanks for the Feedback (I started listening to the audiobook version and finally bought my own copy!)
- Turn the Ship Around
- The Power of Habit
- The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
- (Thought it was a Sci-Fi book for a moment there. Ha!)
- Tribal Leadership
- The Effortless Experience ( I started reading this one as well and bought a copy!)
- When Generations Collide
- Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (interesting title! I’m intrigued!)
- Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (Another fascinating title!)
- 4 Tips to Ace Your First 90 Days as a Support Manager
- The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded
Which of these have you read? And which are you thinking to check out?
I bet we’ve given you a lot to pore over, so do take your time to read over the conversations and invest in your own development as a support leader.
If you’re not in the community and would like to join in the conversations, please join us!