Greg Tate VP Customer Success at Optimizely: Strengths in Action #06
Welcome to the sixth episode of the Strengths in Action podcast.
In this episode, I chat to Greg Tate, VP Customer Success at Optimizely and learn:
- how Greg leads a 60 person Customer Success team at a hypergrowth startup
- how Greg crossed the chasm from a sales background to Customer Success leadership
- how the Customer Health Score came back to bite Greg… and more
###
Nils Vinje:
Welcome to the show. I’m joined here with my guest, Greg Tate Tate, VP of Customer Success at Optimizely. Greg Tate, welcome. How are you doing?
Greg Tate:
Well, I’m doing quite well, [inaudible 00:10]. Thank you.
Nils Vinje:
Oh, wonderful. So glad to have you on, man. First maybe you could give us a little background on what Optimizely is and does and what Customer Success is and what’s involved in Customer Success at Optimizely.
Greg Tate:
At Optimizely, we are here to help our customers deliver a delightful experience to all of their customers, and we do that by providing a platform for our customers to optimize those experiences through digital channels. We got our start in AB testing and now we do personalization of the web experience and mobile experiences for all of our customers.
At Customer Success at Optimizely, we actually have four different things that we provide for our customers. Tech support rolls up as part of our Customer Success offering. We’ve actually rolled in something fairly interesting that I don’t think a lot of other people are doing, is a full educational team that’s developing a lot of our sales service, academy certifications, the community as part of what they own, knowledge based articles, and then we have your classic Customer Success management team that we’ve divided in both a corporate and enterprise motion, and lastly we’re developing as we speak, actually, a more complete professional services team within Optimizely to provide additional services for our customers.
Nils Vinje:
That is an extensive group of teams underneath Customer Success. How many people are in your organization today?
Greg Tate:
At Optimizely we’re a little over 350 people and 60 of those folks are all part of the Customer Success group.
Nils Vinje:
Wow. Okay, so we’ve got 60 people focused on support, education, the traditional customer success and now professional services.
Greg Tate:
That’s right.
Nils Vinje:
That education piece you mentioned was something that most people may not be involved with. What was the impetus for starting that and how did you go about identifying that as a good next step to build in your organization?
Greg Tate:
My director of education actually has an interesting saying. He says, “Education is the scaling factor of Customer Success.” When you think about what are our Customer Success mangers doing, what are our tech support folks doing, what are some of our professional services folks doing when they’re engaging with our customers? Most of the time they’re transferring knowledge to that customer. We believe very, very strongly in the enablement approach of Customer Success. How do we get our customers enabled to be successful with our products? If you think about taking all of those motions from a Customer Success manager, from a tech support engineer or even from a services provider out in the field and turn those into re-usable, scalable content, so we think about things like a knowledge base article or an academy learning program that is easy to consume …
Nils Vinje:
If you’re hearing the dings, we’re talking with the VP of Customer Success who is always on demand and has a lot going on. He’s silenced all his dings before, but we may have missed one or two, so we’re going to give him a second to silence the remaining ones.
Greg Tate:
I apologize to the folks there. To get back on track here, how do we take all of those interactions that we’re having with our customers with the different Customer Success humans and turn that into something that our customers can access whenever they want and however they would like to, and we feel like the education team is the thing that will allow us to manage to create those re-usuable components.
What’s interesting is our education team is not necessarily the one that’s creating all of those components. We actually sometimes call them the education operations team, so they’re creating the platforms and infrastructure and processes for us to collect that information from our tech support engineers, from our CSMs and from our professional services humans and give them an easy way to create and manage and publish all of that information into the different channels that we have [inaudible 04:31] called the Optiverse for our customers to go consume.
Nils Vinje:
That’s fascinating. The education piece does come up, and CSMs in traditional sense is an awful lot of transferring knowledge, and I know I’ve been part of CS organizations both as CSM and a leader struggled with how to more effectively educate people on what they needed to know, so that’s really cool. You took the risk of setting up entire team just to focus on how to deliver that content. Then they may not necessarily have the content, but the expertise is in-house. They just have to find the right way to deliver it.
Greg Tate:
Right.
Nils Vinje:
Very cool. Let’s go back before you joined Optimizely and tell us a little bit about your career path, where you came from prior to getting to Optimizely.
Greg Tate:
Yeah, I actually for most of my professional career was on the pre-sale side of the house. I was actually not a customer success individual, but I was a sales individual, both as a sales engineer and sometimes even as a sales rep or an account executive. I actually got started that way because when I was very, very young, still in my college days, I was a defense contractor for the Navy.
Nils Vinje:
Wow.
Greg Tate:
Writing code for the Navy down in San Diego and we were working on a project where we had a lot of vendors coming in to pitch us products, and the vendors would always show up with two individuals. There would always be the guy with the nice suit and carrying a bag, and then there was the guy that I would talk to that actually helped me understand what the product did and how it would work and how it would make me more successful. I asked that guy, “So what exactly is your job?” They all told me they were sales engineers. I said, “Well, I want to do that. That seems like a really fun thing to do.” You get to walk around, learn about what people are doing. You get all kinds of new and fun information from talking to people about their projects and how you could help their projects be more successful.
It really satisfied a lot of my natural curiosity to want to learn new and fun things. I made it a point after college to go pursue the sales engineering role and I did that for a long time. I worked in enterprise software. I worked at a couple startups and I worked with larger companies. I worked at [Brashville 06:54] Software before they were acquired by IBM. I worked a little company called Web Methods that was a fun ride right around the last dot com boom. We were selling pick axes to the minors [inaudible 07:07], and I was just learning a whole bunch of really, really awesome things as I was out there talking to all of these customers.
Along the way I heard of this company called Salesforce.com and I thought they were kind of cute little small business company that didn’t satisfy my need to go talk to large enterprises, but somewhere along the way I discovered that they were much, much more than that and I decided to go and see what they were doing. I took one of my sales [inaudible 07:35] shops over to Salesforce.com and I got my indoctrination into software as a service, and that’s really where I learned what software as a service was all about. Mark [inaudible 07:46] is quite the preacher when it comes to software as a service.
One of the things that I got to learn along with Salesforce was that in order for a software as a service company to be successful you have to get the renewal. You have to provide the right level of value throughout the life cycle with your customer that they want to continue to be with you. Otherwise it simply doesn’t work. What I discovered is that in order to continue to provide value to the customer, you need to continue to do the very best parts of selling, which is always understanding what your customer is trying to do, why it would be valuable to them, what the impact and benefit to them would be so that natural level of curiosity that I always had as a sales person seemed to be a very, very good fit to the idea of going and talking to somebody in the post sales side of things.
I made a move from Salesforce and started … Well, I went to a little startup called Topsy that got acquired by Apple and then I headed over here to Optimizely and I’ve been here for about two and a half years, really digging deep into how you bring some of those natural high quality sales skills to an engagement in such a way that you’re always discovering value and driving value for your customer.
Nils Vinje:
That’s really interesting. The curiosity piece was a big theme for you and a really important piece even from the earliest days back in college and whatnot. I’m curious about how that curiosity manifests itself when you’ve risen from being just an individual contributor as a sales engineer or even a sales rep where you had that curiosity satisfied daily because you had to talk to more and more and more people, right? How has that changed and worked for or against you as you’ve risen through the ranks and become a leader and now VP where you might not every single day be able to satisfy that because you have to set the agenda by organizational change, get everybody moving in the same direction? Sometimes those things take time. How does that curiosity play out today for you?
Greg Tate:
Yeah, you bring up an interesting point. It’s actually a little frustrating sometimes when you get away from directly customer facing on a daily basis. I do miss that a lot, talking to customers every day. To that end, I actually encourage everybody that even as you get up to the VP levels to always find time in your day to talk to customers and to pursue that. It’s the thing that’s going to keep you guys as close as you can possibly be to what really need to happen.
Certainly, when you think about the additional responsibilities and leading in an organizations and have that curiosity, really help that, I’ve given this advice all throughout my careers. In a customer facing organization where we’re working in large teams, there’s a tendency for everybody on the team to want to ask the customer the same set of questions because they want to hear it directly from the customer’s mouth. I always encourage people if you have somebody that’s already talked to the customer, feel free to ask that particular individual the same questions that you might ask the customer, and when the run out of answers, that’s the time when you need to go talk to the customer and you have an entirely new set of questions to ask that customer.
I exercise that same sort of approach. I have a wealth of information in my entire organization that is talking to customers on a regular basis, dealing with the issues that we have as a company in terms of executing and processes and operations, so I use my natural curiosity to learn from my whole team and actually go and have those deep conversations with the team. “What are the customers saying? What are the issues that you’re running into today? What do you think would be a proper way to develop different programs and different processes and different procedures to help us be better?” You can learn on a regular basis from your team. That’s how I like to pursue that same level of curiosity in this role today.
Nils Vinje:
That’s fascinating. You took the curiosity, you pointed it inwards and have some incredibly powerful questions and thus conversations that help your team grow, too, because you’re asking them the right questions that they need to be thinking about and you don’t necessarily have to have the answer, it sounds like.
Greg Tate:
Yeah, I find that I mostly don’t have the answer because everybody else has the answer. The real trick is how do you take all of those different answers and then build a nice meal out of it? Take all of those recipe pieces and make something bigger out of it.
Nils Vinje:
What of your strengths come into play there? You’re curiosity, which is so dominant, really allows you to bring all this stuff together. Then what happens?
Greg Tate:
Well, you have to be able to make some pretty big decisions based on all this input, and then there’s this idea of getting people aligned and excited and marching towards the same goal with the same drumbeat and creating a product that’s greater than the sum of its parts. There’s a lot of internal selling, and how do you get people aligned around the same goal, the same mission, the same purpose, if you will, to achieving what we want to do within Optimizely? You have to think about, “Who are the people on the team? How do I make sure that they’re understanding what we need to do and why do they want to do that?” If we can get everybody aligned, then we’ll see a whole lot of benefit come from that.
Nils Vinje:
It sounds like your curiosity and you previous sales experience lend perfectly to that kind of a leadership role where you’re not necessarily … you don’t have the answers, but you’re intensely curious, you bring it all together, you make the decisions, and then you sell the vision and you get people.
Greg Tate:
Yeah. I sometimes think that people associate a lot of negative connotation to the idea of sales. You could go actually see in our industry right now, we put blog posts out that are about how to make sales and success get along, and we sometimes think very negatively about the idea of sales, but I like to say sales done right, the non-slimy sales approach is something that allows us to get things to move forward very, very quickly to get people aligned, to get people excited, to get them bought into a shared sense of purpose and goals. It’s a really important aspect of what any leader needs to do in any sort of organization.
When I look at leaders coming into my organization, people that have had some level of exposure to sales, even somebody that maybe has done a retail job when they were in high school or college gets some of their minor after it on the idea of what good and bad parts of the sales process is and how you can leverage some of those things in your everyday leadership responsibilities.
Nils Vinje:
Cool. Cool. That was a lot about where you’ve really excelled in your career and how you’ve gotten those skills to [inaudible 15:19]. I’m curious about where you struggle. Early on as a sales engineer when you rose into management, when you became a manager, when you rose to leadership, where was the real challenge points for you?
Greg Tate:
I’ll tell you, the thing that I love the most about talking to customers is that you get to do something different all the time. There was always a new influence that would come your way. One of the bigger challenges is that when you’re running a large scale organization, you can’t be running to the new shiny object every single time. You really have to think about, “What is the long term goal? How do we get this program that we’re developing through multiple iterations and how do we keep people, and most importantly, how do I keep myself focused on these core sets of initiatives and hold myself accountable for the things that we’re trying to achieve?” Quite frankly, coming from the fast paced world of talking to a whole bunch of different customers, closing a deal and moving on developed some pretty bad behaviors in me in terms of staying focused and achieving those longer term goals, and that’s something that I [crosstalk 16:26]
Nils Vinje:
Can you give me an example of what one of those behaviors was? What was the mentality that you went through when you transitioned and couldn’t do that anymore?
Greg Tate:
Interesting, we have what we call the OKR setting process here, which is the Outcomes and Key Results that we want to achieve within every quarter. The first couple of quarters, as I was new and excited about what was happening here in customer success and all the things that I wanted to achieve, I would create a set of initiatives that I would really only think about for the first quarter. “Hey, we need to …” What’s a good example of one that I moved away from way too …
Something that everybody talks about if they’re brand new into the world of Customer Success, “We need customer health score. Why don’t you just do that for one quarter and then we’ll have it all figured out and I’ll move on to the next thing.” If I set out a set of OKRs, “We’re going to figure out the customer health score,” and I thought, “Yeah, we have enough of a framework here. This is good enough and I’ll move onto the next thing,” and it really did bite me because customer health score is not something that you can just decide upon and move forward. It’s a much longer term, possibly never ending effort to really evaluate and iterate on how you are scoring your customer’s health in a meaningful and useful fashion.
Nils Vinje:
What was the impact of that? After that first quarter you moved on. You said it came back to bite you. How exactly did it come back to bite you?
Greg Tate:
Well, so we had a customer health score that was not based on any sort of actual reality by the time we started to make decisions using that health score later on down the line. In the next quarter I said, “Well, we should put some automation together that’s using that customer health score,” If you don’t have people brought into the health score, you don’t have meaningful interpretation of that health score, it’s hard to get alignment around what sort of automation you should be putting into place. Very quickly you were able to see that without keeping some longer term focus that selling of the new vision and keeping people aligned around our common purpose became harder and harder. Really thinking about some of these initiatives in the longer term is going to allow you to keep the team focused on the things that you want to keep them focused.
Nils Vinje:
What are some of the things that you have done to specifically address that challenge area where you came into a world of, “We can hit this and then we’ll just move on, we’ll move on, we’ll move on,” but you saw the impact of that. It was not good, right? What are some of the things that you did the next quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter to help maintain your focus and remember those learnings as opposed to just saying, “Oh, well, it was a health score, and that thing is tough anyways”?
Greg Tate:
Yeah, I started to set my OKRs on a much longer horizon. What I want to do as the leader of the Customer Success organization is set some higher level outcomes and key results that I could hold in place for longer than single quarter and then keep everybody as we go through quarterly planning, keep people aligned to those overarching outcomes and key results that we have in place for longer than one quarter. It allows us to think longer term about realistically how long are these projects going to take? What are the outcomes that we’re going to expect within the quarter and how do those tie into the longer vision that I have?
I’ll tell you, there’s some frustration that goes along with that. Every time I go to … I would do this at the [Polls 20:16] Conference and you hear all of these wonderful things that people are trying and you think to yourself, “God, I want to go try those things,” and the reality is you have to stick with what you’re already working on and figure out how you’re going to incorporate those new concepts in the longer view. For somebody that’s always [inaudible 20:34] the new and curious to try something different, that continues to be a challenge for me.
Nils Vinje:
How long are we talking here when you say longer than a quarter? Give me just a rough sense of where you target your ideal OKR in your timeline now as compared to two years ago when you started this. How far out are you looking?
Greg Tate:
It’s evolving still, so I moved to holding things to a two-quarter long time frame and I did that about three quarters ago and seeing a lot of benefit from that sort of focus, so much so that I’m thinking that perhaps I should have even longer. One of the things that we’re incorporating more and more into our planning process is more of the agile methodology where you think about the different initiatives that you’re going to try to roll out with priority or weight or effort. One of the things that happens when you start to think longer term is that really big boulders seem to take up all of the time and effort where you’re focusing on and you’ll overlook some of the little pebbles that you can get done quickly and get a lot of return on, and so we think it’s really important that if we stick with longer term themes, that you have to figure out how to get lower effort, higher priority things stuck into that ongoing planning phase so that you can get the benefits of both.
Nils Vinje:
That’s really fascinating to hear how you view planning, and we’re talking about a couple hundred person overall company organization, a 60 person CS team, and we’re talking two quarters at a minimum now for one OKR and then potentially going to three or even four might benefit greatly. I think it’s wonderful advice for all the leaders out there, not just CS but others in terms of keeping people engaged and motivated and giving things enough time. Things change all the time and you’ve got to adapt and you’re never going to know that within the short period of time. I like it a lot.
Let’s shift gears here a little bit and I want to talk about personal development. You’ve been very successful in going from intern in college to startups to Salesforce to Optimizely VP. What is your philosophy around personal development and how have you lived that throughout your career?
Greg Tate:
One of my real big driving philosophies on personal development is that every individual owns their own personal development. They really should be thinking about their manager and their manager’s manager and their peers and anybody else that they can go out and grab as a mentor as resources that they can draw upon to help them develop their own career. All too often I think people are expecting that to be done for them, that my managers are responsible for figuring out what I need to do to become better or the people operations or HR are responsible for figuring out what I need to do to become better and eventually be the CEO that I want to be. Everybody seems to want to become that CEO.
Really, the ownness is on you, and I always give the advice of thinking about not what is the role that I want to have in the future, but really what are the behaviors and responsibilities that I’d like to have within that role and how do I go develop the ability to have those behaviors? How do I develop the ability to have those responsibilities? Think about all the different resources that are available to you out there and whatever works best for you.
If you’re a really good student, there’s a whole lot of classes that you can go pursue. If you have a great network of individuals, you can find time to sit down and learn from them, but also think about as you are planning the next step, if you will, in your career, rather than think about “What is the next role that I want to have, think about what are the responsibilities and behaviors, all of the roles that are available to me, what do they have and which do I want to pursue next and am I capable of developing those behaviors and responsibilities right now in terms of where I am in my overall development?”
My biggest advice to anybody is it’s up to you and it’s your responsibility, and demand from your manger, demand from your people operations or HR team what you need, and you should be the one finding what you need. They would love to hear that input. I know as a manager I love it when somebody shows up and says, “Hey, here’s what I really want to do,” and they’re not talking about the next job that they want to have but the next thing that they want to develop and asking me how they can go ahead and what sort of resources would I recommend and do I have some resources that I can add then towards? Those are the folks that I see are accelerating very rapidly in their career.
Nils Vinje:
That’s wonderful advice. Don’t focus on the role. Focus on the behaviors and the skills needed to execute whatever role it is. Roles don’t matter. Two, the people around you, your mangers, your leadership, the company, your friends, your network, those are resources. They are not the source, though. They are resources.
Greg Tate:
Nice.
Nils Vinje:
Wonderful advice. Wonderful advice, Greg Tate. We’ve talked a little bit about your insatiable curiosity. I want to know what makes you unique.
Greg Tate:
What makes me unique? I think one of the things that I’ve always been able to do is be likable and direct. Whenever …
Nils Vinje:
Can you give me an example of being likable and direct? Just a fictitious thing.
Greg Tate:
Yeah. It’s really important that in your state of learning and your insatiable desire to discover new things that you’re able to ask the really difficult questions, you’re able to probe into areas where you’re going to do true discovery. This is true regardless of who it is that you’re interacting with, and so it’s sometimes going to be very off putting to be that direct, but it’s important that people are okay with that, so you have to blend that allowing people to be comfortable, which I guess is what I consider likable. If you’re making somebody comfortable and they are interacting with you in a great fashion, and blending that with the ability to get more direct and get deeper to learn the things that really, really matter.
As I talk to customers, one of the things I always like to find out is what really is keeping them up at night? What are they most worried about? They’re not going to tell you that if you’re not somebody that they’re comfortable with and can interact with. Developing that relationship that has the ability for that free flow of information, I think, has always been something of a skill set of mine and one that I think is important in the world of customer success as well, creating that relationship and leveraging that relationship to help the customer solve their deepest, darkest fears and concerns so that they can truly experience the benefit that they’re looking for.
Nils Vinje:
Yeah. Great point there. How about within your organization for the people that work for you? I imagine that they get to know you over time and know your personality and know you’re direct, but is this something that you bring up as a way of when you’re getting to know new members of your team or getting to a discussion like, “Look, this is how I operate. I always want to be direct, but this is the reason why.” Do you ever say that kind of stuff or how do they know? One thing I can imagine is that if somebody is completely unknown, doesn’t know you and you’re extremely direct even if you’re likable, it can be a little off putting because they view the world in a different way.
Greg Tate:
Yeah.
Nils Vinje:
How do you compensate for that either internally or even externally, too, if they are not that familiar with you yet but you still want to have that deep conversation?
Greg Tate:
I’ve discovered something really, really interesting. There’s a lot discussed about the millennial attitude, and there’s a lot of discussion for somebody who might be slightly older than the millennials managing a bunch of millennials. I’ve discovered that they want the feedback. Often I’ve read a lot of counseling that perhaps you need to soft pedal a little bit with the millennial generation in that they’re not open to direct feedback, and I have discovered much the opposite, that they are craving, they desperately want to be better. They’ve grown up in an environment where they feel like they are always capable of improving and the gamification of the education that they went through, there was always a way for them to get very, very direct feedback all the way through their schooling career.
When I’ve saw down with folks and said, “Look, I want to give you direct feedback because I think that there are lots of awesome ways that you can take your natural skill set and make it more valuable and do more with it, and here’s what I’ve observed and here’s what I would recommend,” and I also ask a lot of questions in the process of getting direct feedback like, “Why did you take that approach?” or “What were you thinking when that happened?” so that I can understand where they’re coming from and include them in that feedback so it’s not just about, “Here’s what I think,” but “Let’s do this together.” Like I said, they crave that direct feedback and I often find that we have a much better working relationship when you give them that feedback that they’re looking for.
Nils Vinje:
It sounds like it’s pairing the directness with the curiosity, which is your questions so that you can basically come at this from a joint side, joint thing. It’s not just “I’m being direct for the sake of being direct because I know everything and I’m going to tell you what I know.” Even if you were likable, they would kill you, right?
Greg Tate:
Yeah. [crosstalk 31:24] I actually don’t know that much, so it’s important that I ask a lot of questions.
Nils Vinje:
Exactly. That is the key. I’m with you a hundred percent. Asking those questions brings other people into a collaborative space as opposed to being direct and it feeling one sided. That is the single greatest thing from a manager to employee to a customer to anybody out there. [inaudible 31:50] is inviting into a collaborative space as opposed to just staying one sided. I think that’s something that oftentimes can get overlooked, but I really like how you pair your natural skills on the curiosity with the questions with the directness, which both are absolutely necessary.
Greg Tate:
Yeah.
Nils Vinje:
Where do you get the most satisfaction in your work today?
Greg Tate:
I think this sounds contrite a little bit, but most of my enjoyment is seeing the individual contributors grow and become successful. When a CSM comes to me and says, “Man, I just want to share this awesome quarterly business review feedback that I just got,” and they’re beaming and you can see how they’ve been given the correct tools, they’ve been given the correct guidance, they’ve been given all of the things that they need to go be successful, and when you see them in that glow of delivering some value to the customer and getting positive feedback from them, meaning that they’ve done their job really, really well and they’re super stoked on it, that’s a good day. It’s less about, “Oh, the numbers look really, really good,” or “The Salesforce dashboard has hit the green.” Those are nice little dopamine hits, but the really long term enjoyment is when you see people that are in their groove and they’re having a good time and [inaudible 33:29]
Nils Vinje:
Awesome, man. Awesome. That is really wonderful to hear. The focus, it’s not even that your health score is dialed in finally, right?
Greg Tate:
It never will be. [crosstalk 33:47] dialed in, I’m never going to be happy.
Nils Vinje:
When an individual is dialed in and they are growing, that lights you up and that’s really awesome to hear. What are you, Greg Tate, most talented to do?
Greg Tate:
I don’t know. Make people laugh. I don’t know. I think the most talented for me is the stand and deliver, the ability to motivate a group of people towards a common purpose. I often joke with my wife that I feel like my best talents are best suited to start a cult, and she doesn’t want me to start a cult, which is probably the right thing [inaudible 34:41], but I think those are my true talents, is driving people towards a purpose and preaching the gospel, if you will, of why we want to do what we’re going to do and getting people motivated to go out and try to achieve it.
Nils Vinje:
That’s awesome. I remember from a previous conversation you and I had, you’re number one most dominant strengths from the strength finder world was [woo 35:08], right?
Greg Tate:
Correct. Correct.
Nils Vinje:
That sounds perfectly aligned with that, as well as starting a cult, which … I’m not going to judge. As long as you’re maximizing your strengths [crosstalk 35:23] period.
Greg Tate:
That’s what we want to do, right?
Nils Vinje:
That’s what we want to do. Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. On that point, at what point in your career did you know that that was really your strongest area of ability? How did you evolve to get to the point where, “Wow. You know what? I’m really good at this. I should spend more time trying to figure out how to do this better”?
Greg Tate:
It’s an interesting question about whether or not there was a moment in the career where that happened. I feel like I’ve always kind of known that’s something that I enjoy. I was kind of a natural leader in high school on the water pole team. I was a natural leader in the group of friends on campus. There always seems to be a little bit of a leadership streak that I had in all of the things that I was doing, and I think that those are things that I enjoyed, and when I think back to how was I processing my own personal development, those are the things that I’m like, “Yeah, that’s kind of the responsibility that I want to have. Let me go pursue roles that have that sort of responsibility to them.”
I don’t know if there was a moment in my career where I said, “Oh, aha moment!” There were always moments in my career where there were validations of, “Yeah, I seem to be moving in the right direction,” and that I should continue to pursue the idea, the natural leadership side of things.
Nils Vinje:
Again, if I hear you correctly, it was focusing on the strengths and the talents as opposed to the role. The role you were in didn’t really matter. As long as you were able to satisfy your curiosity and drive this leadership piece and getting other people on board, whatever role you had would’ve been fun, right?
Greg Tate:
Yeah. As long as you get to do the things that you enjoy doing, it doesn’t matter that the role is.
Nils Vinje:
That’s a key theme on this podcast with all the guests, too, is that the roles don’t matter. Finding passion and seeing that in yourself and driving to the nth degree because you love what you do comes from what you’re naturally talented to do. The more you know about that, the more you can develop it and the more fun you’ll have regardless of where you work or what you do.
Greg Tate:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.
Nils Vinje:
Awesome. All right. Last question here. If you could change something about yourself, what would it be and why?
Greg Tate:
I’d like to be about six inches taller. No.
Nils Vinje:
That’s fair. I’ve got a bunch of followup questions to that one.
Greg Tate:
I think if we go back to earlier in the conversation, I think that if I could have a little bit more attention to detail, if I wasn’t so attention deficit disorder when it came to the next new shiny thing, if I was able to sit down when I was riding the broader communication to the entire team about something that I wanted to communicate that I didn’t have to get distracted by 14 other things while I was trying to write that e-mail, if I was able to be more focused, I feel like I would be much more satisfied in the ability to achieve some of the things that I wanted to achieve. That’s what I would change.
Nils Vinje:
Interesting. In light, that may not be an immediate change that you could make, how might you approach that skill set outside of you? In other words, the leadership team you have that works with you. Are there people that have those strengths that you leverage in order do that or do you try to take it all on yourself and suffer through it a little bit?
Greg Tate:
Yeah, I have become really, really honest with myself about the fact that this might not be a change that will ever be realized in terms of my ability to really focus and be detail oriented. It may not be the way that I’m wired, and I can either continue to hit myself over the head and be bummed out about it or I could look around and really think about how the leadership team and the rest of the organization can help me fill some of those gaps. What you find when you do that is that they’re looking for the same thing. If you really pull together a team that can compliment each other’s skills and natural abilities and be really, really comfortable with … I don’t want to use the word delegation, but just shared responsibility around achieving the goals and initiatives and who can achieve what in what time frame, you definitely can accelerate the whole organization.
For me, I look for, when I’m working on an initiative that might have a lot of detail oriented activities, I get my friends that are very, very meticulous and detail oriented to work on those with me. If they require a lot of outward communication, that will fall into my lap, and together we can achieve greatness. I think I would love to develop those skills sets. I would love to be better at doing those things, but also love working with people that can do those things and have mad respect for them and enjoy thoroughly the work product that we can collectively produce.
Nils Vinje:
Wonderful way to say that. I love the “together we can achieve greatness,” and the acceleration that can happen inside an organization when you’re focused on work that is done according to strengths and natural talents as opposed to just time. A lot of people have time, “Oh, well, you have X amount of time. Therefore you get this project,” when that might be a complete wrong thing to do, and it’s going to be done poorly, not because of any ill will but just because they’re not naturally wired to do it that way, and it’s going to take a lot longer.
Greg Tate:
Yeah.
Nils Vinje:
I really like what you said there about building a team and bringing them together around strengths where they compliment each other. It’s not that one is ever better than the other. It’s just that different things have to happen and they have to come together. I play this role, you play this role. Let’s celebrate what we play together and together we can do more.
Greg Tate:
Yeah. When you watch the [inaudible 41:36] here in the Bay Area, so the Warriors Basketball right now, when you watch what a real team can do out there, and ‘unselfish’ is the word often used to describe what they’re doing out on the court, then I think that that’s a really good way for all of us to think about how we should be working together as a team, is unselfishly.
Nils Vinje:
Unselfish. Love it. Awesome. Greg Tate, I appreciate your time so much. I know you’re super busy. Just very thankful to count you as a friend and colleague in the Customer Success space. I appreciate you digging in, sharing your insights with us. Some incredible advice here, so thank you very much.
Greg Tate:
Well, [inaudible 42:11], it was certainly fun to talk to you as well. Thank you.
Nils Vinje:
Cheers.
Greg Tate:
Bye now.
###