Feature Story
Here's the thing about coming into Customer Success the way I did. I wasn't hired and trained into the role, I was already living inside the use cases before I ever got the job. I'd been an SME, a product expert, someone who understood not just what the platform did but how my own customers could squeeze real value out of it. That's how I earned trusted advisor status with account after account. I was reliable, credible and I built real relationships, not transactional ones.
And then I got promoted into leadership, and all of that became a problem.
I had unreasonable expectations for my team, because I was the benchmark. Whatever "good" looked like, it looked like me, and when my team didn't hit that bar I got frustrated instead of curious. But the real issue wasn't the standard. It was that I couldn't hand anything off without it feeling like a loss. The minute I delegated something, two things happened in my head at once. One, I assumed it wouldn't be done to my standard. Two, I quietly knew that if I did it myself, I'd be the hero. Again.
That is an unreasonable and deeply ineffective way to lead. I just didn't know it yet.
I was a director when it caught up with me. We had a big customer onsite coming up, the kind where my VP was flying in too, which meant the pressure wasn't just about the customer anymore. I was working with one of my CSMs to prep, and I was prescriptive about it. I walked through what to include, how to structure the narrative, and even where to pull the data from. I left almost no room for him to make a decision I hadn't already made for him, because in my head, there was no room for error.
Two days before the onsite, he sent me his deck. He was proud of it. He felt like he'd checked every box I gave him.
I opened it and shook my head.
I was overly critical about everything, the design, the narrative, the data, the recommendations. And instead of taking that moment to coach him through it, to give him the chance to hear the feedback and fix it himself, I took the deck and rebuilt the whole thing myself. I robbed him of the one thing that would have actually made him better.
We went onsite and I led the entire meeting, because at that point I was the only one who actually knew the material. It went great and the customer was thrilled with the progress.
Later that day, my boss pulled me aside. He didn't tell me the meeting went well. He asked me why my CSM didn't present.
I explained what happened with the deck, expecting at minimum a shrug, if not a compliment for pulling it off under pressure. Instead he told me I'd failed to lead.
That was my wake up call.
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear in the moment. But it was the moment I stopped confusing control with leadership.
The Takeaway: After that, I started looking for the moments to lead instead of the moments to save the day. I practiced handing things off even when I knew I could do it faster or "better" myself, because faster and better were never the point. Growing someone was the point. And I want to be clear that this wasn't just my problem. It's the number one thing CS leaders come to me for coaching on, and it almost always traces back to the same two things: trust and ego. Sometimes it's dressed up as high standards and other times it's masking as care. But underneath, it's usually one of those two, and most leaders don't figure out which one until someone makes them look at it directly.
THE RESOURCE
Next time you catch yourself rewriting something a direct report handed you, stop and ask two questions before you touch it. First, is this actually wrong, or is it just not how I would have done it? Second, if I fix this myself right now, what does this person lose the chance to learn? If the answer to the first question is "not wrong, just different," put it down. If the answer to the second question is "the exact skill I supposedly want them to build," put it down.
This won't fix trust or ego overnight, but it forces the pause that I didn't have with that deck, and the pause is usually where the better decision lives.
AI in CS
Here's where this gets more complicated, not less. AI is making it faster than ever for a leader to just do the thing themselves. Draft the QBR deck, write the renewal narrative, build the health score summary, all of it in minutes, solo, no handoff required. If delegation was already a trust and ego problem before AI, the tools we're using now are quietly making the "I'll just do it myself" option even more tempting, because the friction that used to force you to hand things off is disappearing.
The leaders I see scaling well aren't using AI to avoid delegation, they're using it to make delegation easier. They're handing their CSMs the AI-generated first draft and coaching them on the judgment calls, the narrative choices, the parts that actually require growth. That's the difference. AI can produce the deck. It cannot teach your CSM how to read a room, how to make a recommendation with confidence, or how to recover when a customer pushes back. If you're using AI to remove yourself from the work entirely, you're not delegating, you're just automating your own ego. Use it instead to lower the stakes of handing something off, so the coaching moment is about judgment, not about salvaging a first draft from scratch.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
The Alignment Problem: Why Companies Fail at Growth Despite Departmental Success
Many organizations celebrate departmental wins, while their companies still struggle with retention, growth, or profitability.
Why?
Because departments are often optimized for their own metrics rather than aligned around shared customer and business outcomes.
Learn how your organization can negate silos, conflicting priorities, and fragmented customer experiences in the August CS Mastermind, The Alignment Problem: Why Companies Fail at Growth Despite Departmental Success.
Join hosts me and Andrew Marks, along with a panel of CS experts, as they dive into how CS leaders can bring teams together around a unified vision of customer and company success.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 11am PT / 2pm EST
During this online event, the panelists will discuss:
→ Why companies struggle with growth, while individual departments appear successful
→ Examples of departmental goals that unintentionally work against each other
→ Metrics and KPIs that encourage company-wide alignment and cross-functional collaboration
→ The role Customer Success plays in strategic conversations across Sales, Marketing, Product, and Support
And more!
Register today and mark your calendar to learn why organizations fail to grow despite apparent departmental success, how misaligned incentives create hidden friction, and what CS leaders can do to bring teams together around a unified vision of customer and company success.
CAST YOUR VOTE
Atonom has launched their awards program recognizing the leaders shaping the future of customer experience and I’ve been nominated.
I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and vote for me. It would mean a lot.
A FINAL NOTE
CLOSING WITH KRISTI
I got the wake up call I needed at a customer onsite with my boss watching, which is a rough way to learn a lesson but an effective one. Most leaders I work with don't get it handed to them that clearly, they just quietly burn out trying to be the hero in every room until something breaks. If trust and ego are showing up in how you lead your team, this is exactly the kind of thing I work through with CS leaders inside coaching, because it's rarely about a framework, it's about building a new muscle.
See you next Tuesday,
Customer Success. Revenue Follows.