Leadership at the Intersection: Navigating the Balance between Management and Leadership
Nate Kermit serves as a seasoned Technical Support Manager at New Relic, Inc., drawing from over ten years of experience to refine his skills in a range of customer-centric roles such as client services, escalation, account management, technical support, and engineering. Nate's broad and varied experience uniquely qualifies him as a valuable leader in the realm of customer support and advocacy.
Check out this video featuring Nate Kermit our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo where he discusses the importance of balancing leadership and management in customer support teams and the value of treating team members as valued partners, emphasizing that it leads to success and growth for both individuals and the organization. Get a sneak peek of his compelling ideas before he takes the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Charles: My name is Charles. I'm the Director of Customer Support at Coastline. And today I'm talking with Nate Kermit, who is a technical manager of support at New Relic. Nate has spent the last decade building his skills across various functions in customer support, customer advocacy, and he's worked in client services, escalation, account management, technical support, engineering; lots of really customer focused roles.
Nate: First I'll just say it's going great because I'm here chatting with you today and that's just a wonderful opportunity. It was great to talk to you last week and I'm really happy to just be here with you following up. My life and my team are both going very well right now. If you think about the phases of teams as you build and rebuild, we are in a performing phase.
So we've gone through the storming, norming and we're onto the performing. So my team is focused on the front end observability tools that New Relic provides. And right now we're really focused on technical knowledge and helping to make our internal and external knowledge more robust so that we can continue to help our customers get the most out of the platform, like you mentioned. And we have a very technical set of products, and so as we are really familiar with doing the core of our role and helping customers fix broken things that gives our team a little bit of space and a little bit of time to really focus on knowledge.
So that's the high level of how things are going. And thanks for having me here.
Charles: What I love about that is this whole idea of using data, capturing data, it's what we thrive on. That's how we measure our success as an organization to make sure that we're giving our customers the best experience, but also serving as knowledge experts for our services or our platform. So your topic specifically is "managing at the intersection of leadership," which is very interesting. Why is this something you want to talk to a group of customer support leaders about?
Nate: Yeah, it's a really good question. When I first started leading this team, I was a new manager. I had just come from a role where I was focused on managing escalations to leading a team of technical support engineers. One of the first conversations that I had with my director at the time, he gave me some homework and he said, "Nate, I want you to go and think about which one's more important: management or leadership. Come to our next one on one. We'll talk about it." So I went off and I went straight to Google and I started looking at what's the definition? What is management and what is leadership? So let's start there. When we talk about leadership, often we're talking about setting a direction, setting a cultural tone, helping to develop and empower our employees. And it's a much looser, more removed type of skill set than management.
Management has a lot more to do with the structure, controlling the actions, setting the workflows putting up the boundaries and sometimes being prescriptive in what we're asking our teams to do or at the very least setting the expectations. And so I came back to Scott the next week and our one on one.
I said," good question, but it's a trick!" Both of these things are obviously important. If you want to be an effective leader of a team, you have to have both of these skill sets, and you have to know when the right time is to lean into management and provide the scaffolding and really help structure the environment for folks to be as successful as possible.
And then there are other times when you have to lean into leadership, and you have to trust that you can empower people to deliver what you know that they're capable of delivering, even if sometimes they don't know they're capable of delivering that themselves yet. So that was something that I thought about right when I started leading this team.
I've kept that thought at the core of my philosophy for how I try and help the team to run. And we've seen some really great success as a result of that. It means that sometimes I'm really flexible in the types of things that I'm asking my teams to do. Sometimes it's just, here is our current performance.
It's not good enough. Where should we go from here? And sometimes it's, okay, this is a security issue and we need to do everything exactly by the book to make sure that we're not exposing ourselves to liability or exposing ourselves to further harm. So that's why it's been such an important topic for me, and we've seen some wonderful success.
I've seen my people grow and flourish into delivering things that they didn't know that they were capable of and really stepping outside of their comfort zone to lean into their strengths. And that's evident in all of the metrics. So I wanted to share some of my learnings with other support leaders, or even folks that are aspiring to step into a leadership role.
Charles: It's both, right? And you said it's a trick question because it is, you can't do one without the other. You can't manage without being a leader. You can't be a leader without managing, and it is something that is so difficult for people to do because when you're a person, you're doing something, you're interacting with customers sometimes that next step for you is a management role. And that is typically how these roles are defined. Your job description is managing a group of people who do a certain thing and making sure that they continue to do that certain thing, but also work on some projects here and there and drive the business forward, all of that other stuff, and typically there's maybe one bullet point or a couple of sentences about enriching the team, growing the team, focusing on career development, etc., but it typically isn't that. That's something I think we all have as senior leaders in the customer support world, we owe that to our teams.
Nate: Absolutely. If I had advice to give to my early management self, it would be that the org chart is lying to you. There may be some clear definitions between the roles of a manager and a senior leader, like a director of VP and a support organization. But when you take a step back and you think of the skill sets that really help people thrive and help teams to be the best that they can be, I think both of those things involves a lot of both management and leadership. It's really hard to apply the right level of nuance to understanding, when I use which lever, so to speak.
Charles: Absolutely. So you've got this intersection. For leaders who are wanting to learn more about managing in that intersection.
How do they take it to the next level?
Nate: That's a great question. And I'll start with one of the prerequisites to being a successful leader at any level is that you have to understand who your team is. You have to know the people on your team and you have to care about them.
You have to care about their career development. You have to care about fostering their success in a way that matches their skill sets, their style and who they are as people. So the first thing that you have to do is take a step back and check in with yourself. Is this something that is true for me?
Because if it's not, none of my advice is going to matter. If you're not really tied in tightly with your team, I think a lot of the leadership things will feel forced and then will fall a little bit flat. And from there, it really comes into having, meaningful conversations with your team and your team members about what their aspirations are, what their strengths are and really seeing, observing and then checking in and talking with them about their perception as well.
Once you have that solid understanding of the players on your team, you can start to set the field, set the pieces in motion that amplify their skill sets the best. And I'll give you an example. I have a few folks on my team, and one of them is very academic in the way that they think about problems and approaching them. So I don't necessarily think that the first task I'll assign that person is something that requires very rapid execution. But if there's something that we need to theorize around, if there's a whole new problem set that we haven't really thought of how we're going to approach, I know that I can give this type of task to this person. They will absolutely develop the idea, they'll come up with some conceptual avenues to explore and then a proposal for where we should start. And conversely, I have some hammers on my team that are the folks that if you say, Hey, here's the thing we need to get done.
It'll be done before we hang up on the Zoom. So I know exactly who is the right fit for each of these different things and also how much guidance to give them. Especially for a junior person on a team. Management becomes more important for the junior folks on the team, because they may not have the experience, the perspective to understand what is really important to us, to our customers, to our business. So explaining some of those things, explaining what is important, but also how we're going to accomplish those things, can then help to build their toolkit, their set of experiences, so that as they become more senior we give a little bit less prescriptive direction in what we're going to do.
It also depends if we're thinking about things that are assigned to an individual or things that the team needs to accomplish together. . Of the things I love to do with my team is when, as a global team, we're underperforming and maybe we have a KPI or an OKR, and we're trying to just use TR as an example.
Our goal at New Relic is to have a less than a 10 day TR and there are a lot of factors that go into it that might not apply to everybody else. But as a global team we were not quite hitting our target. So we set out to first, understand why aren't we hitting this goal? And then to come up with some strategies and some solutions so that we can get under our TTR metric.
The first thing I did with my team, when we even first started talking about this at a high level, I just shared with them what the data looked like. I didn't have a problem statement with it. I didn't tell them that this is something that we needed to fix. I just said, Hey, here's our TTR and here's our target.
And magically behind the scenes, all of a sudden things started to change. And there was a shift in perception, a shift in the approach where folks started to find ways to lower our TTR while still keeping in mind that it was always a balancing act between customer satisfaction. As we approach the actual conversations, it became more of sharing the success stories and the tools and the tips that people were actually using to keep their TTR low, while keeping their customer satisfaction high, that we were able to then take to the global team and say, "Hey, we were actually able to overachieve on this. And this is some of the stuff that we did." So that was an area where I didn't need to say, you're going to follow these steps. I think that's super important at times to be able to identify those areas, where you're working with a wonderful team of intelligent, motivated, driven, capable folks.
And really, all we need to do at some point is steer them in the right direction.
Charles: That's such a good example of managing at the intersection of leadership because a full force management approach to that would have been," you and you change this, and this."
And then a full approach from just all leadership would have been inspiring someone to, "hey! Get out and do your best champ," without giving people anything tangible. And then what you did in that situation was let people arrive at that conclusion.
And effectively you're saying, we got to improve that number and I'm going to be the person to follow up on that and make sure that it gets there. But also empowering and inspiring them this ownership and direct connection between what they do every day and the OKRs.
Nate: Their ability to influence their peers and empowering them to say, "hey, when y'all apply yourselves and when you come up with these solutions, they're really good." And sometimes other people haven't had a chance to come to these conclusions yet. So we can actually help the global team. We can actually go and move these numbers across the organization based on the solutions that you come up with. And it can be really, I'll say dangerous sometimes to take that whole management approach, because the more you tell somebody what to do, the more they'll do exactly what you tell them. And this gives a lot more room for the detailed and nuanced understanding of the folks that are really doing the work every day.
That understand the limitations to understand, the impact of these choices that they may to come up with a solution that doesn't have the gotchas. That isn't just here's the set of steps. It's not just once you give a customer answer, close the thing. But more, okay, how can we make sure that we're trying to give as many resources as possible be as helpful as we can and also, give customers a way to follow back up with us so that they feel like they're taken care of.
They feel like they're in good hands, but we can also stay efficient. We can then move on and focus on the next problem. And also self serving. It's a lazy approach. For me, it's great because it frees up my bandwidth to focus on the things that are really the areas that I need to be more involved with, right?
Telling the story of my team up to the senior leadership folks here in global technical support so that they understand what my team is doing. It's a much harder thing for them to advocate for themselves. It's a position that I'm better suited to spend my time and energy rather than trying to come up with prescriptive solutions for things that they can solve on their own.
Charles: Yeah, absolutely. So this isn't just for people leaders or managers. You just touched on something which was, this approach that I take as a people manager, can influence the decisions that people on my team take to then influence their colleagues of, Hey, here's what we're doing. And they are then becoming and learning how to be leaders on their team because it really is, showing people that you can do something and then following through on that and then, creating an environment where people can also do that.
Nate: I think that one of the key foundations in this is that it's the approach that really treats our people like partners. This isn't something that works if you're in a transactional relationship where you're asking for tasks to be completed, but it is something that helps for the team to feel like they're a valued stakeholder.
And it's true that they are some of the most important folks that we have doing some of the most important work for our company to be successful. So if we treat them like the valued partners that they are, they meet us halfway. If instead we treat them as employees with tasks and just things to cross off lists, the more you ask them exactly what to do, the more they will do exactly what you ask of them.
I think that's another important aspect of it.
Charles: That's so spot on and I've seen that and I'm sure you've seen it from your time having managers and maybe it's when you were more junior people who say, "Nate, hit this number. That's all I need you to do." and you need to help pull the cart forward and at that point you've lost motivation. You're not incentivized aside from just showing up.
Nate: I hate to disappoint you here though, Charles. I've had a bit of a fairy tale decade in my career where I've had the benefit of working with some really wonderful leaders that have always treated me like a valued partner.
Very few times have I've been on the other side of this. So I think as much as I want to empathize with folks in that dynamic, I can't really say that I relate to it in a direct way. I haven't been in that seat, though. That's why I think this is so important and why it's so natural in my approach, in my leadership style.
Charles: Maybe you've heard this instead from the people that work with you on your team that you manage. "Nate, this is one of the best experiences I've ever had . One of the best managers I've ever had."
Nate: This is something that I have heard.
Charles: All right. There we go. And from that point of view, as a people manager, you can just, you can dollars and cents that. You're like, "Oh, this person's going to stay working for our company. We don't have to backfill them." But from a leadership perspective, you're thinking, I just did something for this person that somebody did for me or in the other situation, which is no one ever did this for me in the past.
And now I have the potential to influence this. That's how one person potentially feels. They can also then take that and share that with their colleagues, with their friends, with their family. Gives you a different perspective on what it means to be somebody who's contributing to something in general, right?
Nate: I think it really comes down to, I think this is the right way to treat people. And when you treat people everybody wins. I want to go into all these cliches. Like the sum is more than the total of the parts or, something like that, but really it's: care about your people. Help foster and develop them, give them the space to flourish and grow, treat them as a valued partner and give them the structure that they need to be successful.
But at every step of the way, the question that I ask myself is, what do you need to be the most successful version of you possible? What support, can I document this process for you so that you don't have to think about it? So that the next time you go through it, you pull up a checklist and we've already hammered everything out and we've got all the details there. Or is it give you the space to give feedback about what's not working and then give you the space to come up with some solutions and see where can we start? What's step 1? Where can we iterate? What's step 2? And there's an art to it.
It's not always obvious, but if you ask yourself those questions, if you keep that focus, if you keep that frame of mind, I think you find yourself there fairly naturally.
Charles: Absolutely. These aren't things that you're just born with.
It takes so much effort and you're going to make mistakes along the way and I know you have some great tips and [00:19:00] stuff that you want to share with leaders. So you are going to be at the Support Driven Expo, Las Vegas, October 9th through 10th. And you'll be talking about this a little bit more.
I really look forward to being there and hearing more from you about this. I know a whole bunch of other leaders do as well. So glad you signed up to talk about this.
Nate: Please do come to my talk and please, chase me down afterwards and ask me questions. Give me some scenarios where you're looking for help trying to figure out what's the right tool for the problem that you're trying to solve or the opportunity that you have in front of you.
Charles: How can people get in touch with you?
Nate: So I'll be at Support Driven Expo and getting there fairly early on Sunday. So I'll be there at the Sunday night social event. Come and find me. You can get ahold of me on Slack. I'm @NateKermit in the Support Driven Slack, or you can shoot me an email either nkermit@gmail.com or nkermit@newrelic.Com. Both of them find their way to me.
Charles: Yeah, that's so great. And part of all of this is you meet up with folks and then there's a collaboration effort that comes after that. It's , "Oh, Nate, I was just writing a post about this and I would really love you to contribute" or you find mentorship opportunities with people who are like, "Nate, this is something I want to move into. How can I get there?" or you find somebody there who you really connect with who can mentor you. And that's something that a lot of senior leaders try to focus on as well.
Nate: I don't think I can nod loud enough for the folks to hear me. So since I know the video part might not be captured, I'm nodding as loud as I can, but I hope to see folks at the expo. Nate, it's good to chat with you. Thank you for sharing this. And I look forward to hearing more about it at the expo.
Thanks for having me, Charles. Take care.
Check out this video now featuring Nate Kermit our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
