Individual Contributor or Leadership Career Path?

bwilliams10

Hi GGR community! As a CSM, I've been an IC for the my entire career in Customer Success. As I am looking to progress in my career, I am debating what path I want to go through. I love helping others achieve their goals and coaching them towards those positive outcomes, both customers and my team whenever I have the opportunity. 

When considering your career growth and trajectory, what are some of the things that should be considered for making the decision to stay as an individual contributor or go into leadership?

Clay Telfer

Every job will always have problems, so make sure you pick a job where you don't hate those problems. Jeffrey and Rachel already listed some good examples: there are very difficult conversations about how people need to improve (or about how they're being let go), you have less direct control, all that.

I'll add one thing that was a big adjustment for me is that, as you climb the management ranks, the things you're working on have longer and longer timeframes. The results can also be fuzzier, too. As an example, I once spent six months on a project to see if we could improve retention by ensuring certain customer experiences, and the end result was that those experiences didn't improve retention at all. That didn't feel very good, but my boss pointed out that I needed to reframe my thinking. The best outcome was learning that we could improve retention with these experiences, but it was still a good outcome just to learn that it wouldn't work, and that we needed to focus our efforts elsewhere.

That was a lot harder for me to view as a "win" than expanding a customer or having the best churn numbers of the quarter, so there was definitely a big adjustment period, but I just love the strategy and coaching so much that it was worth the adjustment for me!