There's a chair in there
Growing up in suburban Sydney, my grandparents lived next door. We would pop through the gate in our shared fence for afternoon tea. Adults sat around the dining table, my brothers and I (and sometimes our cousins) sat around a coffee table in the sunroom.
Sunroom seating was not assigned. It was more of a Southwest-style1 scramble for the good chairs. The slowest child would end up on “the pouff”, a small 1970s orange cube squeezed into a gap between its creaking wicker colleagues. We all ate the same food (generally sponge cake and those unnaturally pink cocktail frankfurts that my grandfather cheekily referred to as “little boys”), but the seating was a real class divider. Through years of chair competition, we all developed skills that would pay off throughout our kids' party musical chairs careers.
“Support getting a seat at the table” is a game with a similarly long history. We’ve published some articles, but just getting a seat doesn’t mean anyone else at the table is listening to you. Maybe your support team is at the table but wearing the corporate equivalent of a bib and a sippy cup. Maybe you’re on the broken folding chair from the garage while the sales and engineering teams are in the prime chairs used when visitors come.
Yes, getting a seat is the first step. The next step is to get the ear of whoever is at the head of the table. or the Littlefinger beside them.
There’s a political game being played at those tables that many of us in Support Land have little experience with. We don’t often arrive with MBAs, spitting acronyms like Kendrick bars. We’re more often Vanilla Ice. FRT, FRT2 baby.
I would love to see more people with support backgrounds building companies. It does happen: ZSA founder Erez Zukerman started out in support. YNAB’s Todd Curtis (my guest for the next episode of The Supportive podcast, coming soon) began his journey to CEO by leading the YNAB support team. Subscribe now in your podcast app so you don’t miss his story.
The support community needs more of you dragging your favorite chair up to the table and making an impact. One factor which can help you be heard at that table is your corporate structure, and that’s where I’d love your help.
Can you please answer this single question survey for me friend?
Where does your support team report into? Are you under Ops, or Product, or Success? Something else? At Help Scout, Abigail is our VP of Customers, and she reports right to our CEO.
