Matt Dale- Resilient Leadership: Navigating Layoffs and Reduced Budgets
Matt Dale, the founder of Moxie CX, LLC is a customer experience expert who helps companies understand and enhance their customer's experience. With a focus on companies in transition, Matt partners with clients to develop CX strategies that impress customers, optimize scalability, reduce churn, and drive success. He offers strategic planning, fractional leadership roles, customer journey mapping, team training, success tooling, and more in the CX space. With over 15 years of experience in building successful support and data services teams, Matt is known for his collaborative approach, data-driven decision-making, and expertise in scaling teams using technology and workflows.
Watch this video featuring Matt Dale our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit, where he shares a framework for handling challenging situations in the workplace, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging emotions, effective planning, and clear communication during times of significant change. This video offers a sneak peek into the compelling insights Matt will be sharing on stage in Oakland. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
Matt Dale:
I've been in support my entire career. At my previous gig at Illuminate Education, we built a team starting from scratch. Going from the first support agent all the way to buying nine different companies, integrating those teams, spinning up and working with an offshore team, and supporting nine different products over three channels.
Through that, there's been a lot of different challenges and trying times. When I started, there were about 20 of us in the company and with any startup, there's kind of a lack of clearly defined roles. I think my official title was “project manager” because they didn't really know where to put me and what I was going to do.
In the beginning, everyone in the company had phones at our desks and we all had Zendesk accounts, so everyone could help with support. However, with all the “help” there was a specific lack of accountability for who was responsible for supporting our customers. To provide a consistent experience, we started focusing on building a support team with specific goals and responsibilities.
When we grew to around 12 people, I realized that we needed a little bit more of a management structure than just having everyone reporting directly to me. We introduced smaller squads that made up the team with team leads managing each squad.
As the company grew, we took on private equity funding. Their model was to scale quickly and hire a bunch of people. We went from about 80 people in the organization to 200 very quickly. We also started the acquisition process for our first acquisition. It was a challenging time.
In 2015 we got the initial, PE funding. Fast forward another two years, and we'd acquired four or five companies. Our founder decided to sell a majority of his ownership share to the PE company. At that point, we switched into full PE mode and completed a total of nine acquisitions with products that were in our K-12 market space but were adjacent products to our current portfolio in most cases.
We had a couple of products overlapped, but many were designed to be complementary and present a unified product suite for our clients. That meant that we had to integrate different systems so we could work from the same tool set and the same playbook. The goal was to get everyone communicating well with our internal team, then also working with external teams: product, the CSM team, the sales team, our data integration teams, etc. Trying to answer the question: how do we do things the Illuminate way rather than running nine different companies, each with its own approach?
We were dealing with the challenge of working with new teammates who had just found out they had been acquired. How do you help those folks feel welcome, safe, and comfortable so they can continue doing their job well in light of the normal fear and uncertainty that comes from an acquisition? These are folks who were happy at their job, but the owner of their company decided to sell the company and upend their world. They’re asking questions like: what are things going to look like in six months? Do I even have a job? What is going to change?
In the midst of these challenges, we were owned by a PE company; they’re not usually in it for the long haul. Ultimately, they’re looking for a liquidity event. As a leader, how do we prepare for that liquidity event?
Throughout this process, we had several rounds of layoffs and redundancies, to get us focused in the right area. As a leader in that situation, a lot of times it was, “Here's the budget” or “Here's what we're trying to accomplish, figure out how to make it work.”
In one case, one of the companies we bought had to branch in India. How do we use that to help with our support efforts without compromising our support quality? What can we do to spin up a team in that area? My job was to figure out how to make this work, but also provide a customer experience that our customers don't actually hate.
And that's what I’ll be talking about in my talk. What to do when your boss comes to you and says, “Something big is going on, figure this out.” How do you as a leader, approach that situation? How do you work with your leadership team? How do you work with the people on the front lines and deliver it and execute it in the best way possible?
You have to keep the ship going in the right direction. How do you do it without swamping it? I think as leaders, we all go through different situations, some of them are, really big and bad, like dealing with layoffs or dealing with, news of being acquired or something like that, while others are those small things that can still be overwhelming.
We can approach those situations with, a framework, an approach to say, “How do I make sure that I'm taking care of myself?” I'm thinking through this properly, I'm planning well, I'm communicating. The first human response is to freak out a little bit How am I supposed to run a team with this volume coming in? And you're saying I need to have 20% fewer people on the team and still provide great support? It’s a lot for a leader to deal with.
Initially, there’s an emotional response. The first step in the framework is to acknowledge that emotional response. Buy a little bit of time to process emotions and the situation before I move into the planning phase. Because when our emotions go up, our intellectual abilities go down. We're in fight-or-flight mode, not in rational-thinking mode.
As I go through the talk, we're going to go through some of the different steps in the framework, but I think it's really important to acknowledge those different areas if we're going to be, effective leaders for our team.
That’s what my talk is about discussing a framework for handling tough situations. In the discussion, I’ll share an example of a tough situation I’ve navigated and how I applied the framework in this case. I hope it will help if you find yourself in a similar situation. I'm excited, to share what I've come up with, with the group and kind hear people's feedback. I'm hopeful this will start a dialogue, throughout, the rest of the conference.
Check out the video now featuring Matt Dale our upcoming speaker for November's Leadership Summit