My head of customer success is an original leadership team member who did great when we had ten clients, but now that we have scaled to a hundred, they are working eighty hours a week, refusing to delegate, and burning out. How do we help them scale or transition them without breaking our culture?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a company scales, the seats on the Accountability Chart must grow with it. A common trap is assuming that because someone was a superstar at five million, they will automatically know how to lead at twenty million. If your customer success director is working eighty hours a week and refusing to delegate, they are running on brute force, not capability. This is a GWC gap. Specifically, they lack the capacity to lead and manage at the next level.

To resolve this without breaking your culture, you must have an honest, vulnerable conversation outside of your Level 10 Meeting. Use the GWC tool. Ask them if they truly get, want, and have the capacity for this larger seat. Often, when you explain that the seat now requires designing scalable systems and managing managers, they will admit they are miserable. They miss working directly with customers.

Once you expose this gap, your job is to create a new seat that leverages their unique strengths. You can bring in a seasoned executive who has scaled customer success teams to run the department, while transitioning your legacy director into a high-level customer advocacy or key accounts seat. This honors their loyalty and preserves company culture, while ensuring your leadership team has the capacity to build an exit-ready organization.