How MeUndies’ Head of Customer Experience Motivates Excellence
In this series, we sit down with people who have led and scaled teams to better understand the critical skills behind effective leadership. This week, we chatted with TJ Stein, Head of Customer Experience at MeUndies, who shared his experience on learning to become a better manager.
WorkRamp: Let’s start with the hard stuff. What was the biggest mistake you made early on?
Stein: I think my natural instinct as a first time manager was trying to make everyone happy. In retrospect, I think that’s a fairly obvious mistake you see all the time.
Trying to make everybody happy is really just a recipe for managerial mediocrity.
I think that I’ve learned a lot in that aspect. It may feel good at the end of a meeting or one-on-one to avoid conflict, but that report or peer will be no better because of it.
WorkRamp: What type of leadership philosophy do you subscribe to?
Stein: I’ve always been a practitioner of servant leadership. It’s no longer about just you any more. You’re removing all the self-interest and personal glory as an individual contributor. That’s really the most important thing you can do to build trust. You have to focus on the success of the organization and your team. You ask questions.
You’re actively valuing other people’s input and perspectives. I think the result is a more thoughtful and balanced leadership approach
WorkRamp: How do you keep your team motivated?
Stein: Everybody is going to have different thoughts about what motivates them. Speaking to my previous experience at Media Temple, the single largest contributor to employee motivation was that we implemented this very clear, transparent model of career development for our team. Traditional contact centers are not very glamorous places to work. In fact most are just downright terrible. By investing in a career development roadmap that exposed individual performance relative to their role at the company, we made our contact center a really great place to work.
WorkRamp: Any other creative motivation ideas?
Stein: More often than not that, a simple gesture of recognizing someone going above the norm, and doing it in a really genuine way, talking about it during a team meeting, really helps.
Sometimes it is offering a special “employee parking” for the week. Taking someone to lunch. Expanding their responsibility. Those sort of things feel small on paper, but those gestures go a really, really long way.
I would say obviously that developing that model of career development is important, but also the simple act of recognition is just as critical. A lot of traditional managers will just look at their P&L and figure out new ways of incentivizing performance with money, but that doesn’t always work. Especially for the younger generation of our workforce, I find they are more often than not looking for more responsibility.
WorkRamp: How do you think about career development for your team?
Stein: We look at the scope and complexity of what they’re going to be responsible for in a role. I often use this analogy of when you’re in you’re starting out, you’re learning about rope. When you’re developing your skill set, you can tie basic knots, and you can be taught complex knots. When you start getting into advanced and expert roles, now you’re calculating rope strength. You know a lot about knots. You become an expert at rope making. Then if you become comfortable in a leadership capacity, you’re teaching others about ropes and knot making. I know it sounds really silly, but I’ve always fallen back to this rope, knot making analogy because ultimately it is something that has been clear for me to understand and have others understand as well.
