Episode 01 | The Helper Personality

Introduction

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey , cs Psychos . Today we're going to be talking about the helper personality . We'll talk about what it is , why that's relevant to customer success and how it causes a lot of CS leaders to become burnt out and resentful , without ever really becoming effective in their new role . That's all coming up next right here on Psychology of Customer Success . Stay tuned . Humans don't think or behave like computers . You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do . So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic ? I'm Rachel Provan , cs Leadership Coach , award-winning CS strategist and certified psych nerd . I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy , leadership and mindset , using my secret weapon , psychology . Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success , where we'll dive into why people do the things they do , what motivates them and the effect that has on your CS strategy , team dynamics and executive presence . We'll dig into subjects like the helper personality , how thought errors like it's just easier if I do it keep your department stuck in reactive mode , and how cognitive bias can really screw up your customer journey . Plus much more . Make sure to subscribe on Apple , spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie . Talk soon , and here's to your success .

Chapter 1: The Helper Personality

Speaker 1 1:30

Welcome back .

Speaker 1 1:31

This is episode number one and we're talking about the helper personality . So the helper personality is something that is referred to in enneagrams . Enneagram is a personality test similar to Myers-Briggs . In Myers-Briggs , this would be generally the INFJ or the ENFJ , given what CS started as and look , I've been around CS a long time .

Speaker 1 1:58

For a long time , it was about retention and the way that you got there was that you got the customer what they came for . You got them their initial desired outcome . So if they wanted the product to help them save time when inputting things into their CRM , that's what you needed to help them get to . It wasn't like , oh , we need to help them use this feature of our product . It was did they get the result they were looking ? Now , this still definitely holds true today . It's just that it's hard to measure , so I think that's why it's gotten a little bit muddy in CS . What do we really do ? How do you measure that ? I think that we're getting to a place where outcomes are going to be more measurable with AI and with a few new tools that are coming out and I think people are starting to understand that .

Speaker 1 2:46

But that was the original point of CS getting people what they want . And what were we there to do ? We were there to help them get there . A lot of people who originally got into CS did that because they wanted a nine to five that paid well . That wasn't a sales job , that didn't need to be super , super technical , but that was still helping . We really wanted to help people .

Speaker 1 3:10

Most of us found that sales felt too like it was too self-motivated . Sales can be great in terms of if you approach it with a helper personality , actually , but the real reason we came to it was we tended to be smart people who like to think in terms of strategy and we liked the end result to have helped other people . Some people are motivated by money , some people are motivated by helping others , people are motivated by safety , and none are any better or worse than each other . Be very clear here . It's just people have different things that drive them . So for people who come into CS , that tends to be helping others and that's a beautiful thing . If you think about it people who are driven to help others the net of their life is going to be positive . Most likely . If that's the true motivation , then they're going to lead the world a little bit better than they found it , and that's something that's always really excited me about being that type of person . So we'll talk a little bit about the worm and fuzzies of it and then we'll talk into how it can be a little bit challenging because , let's be honest , cs is really challenging right now . If I can find ways to help you , lean into who you are and still be able

Chapter 2: Strengths of the Helper Personality

Speaker 1 4:27

to get around some of those challenges , that's how I want to help today .

Speaker 1 4:31

A few things about the strengths of the helper personality so empathy and compassion , warmth and approachability , strong interpersonal skills , and we're intuitive in terms of understanding what other people need . It's really helpful in our field to be able to sense what people are saying , even when they can't quite articulate it themselves , and a lot of helper personalities are really good at that intuition , that sense of I can tell what this person's trying to communicate , even if it is not completely spelled out for me , they understand things . Maybe you understand things based on someone's tone of voice or expressions on their face , and that's not unusual . It's something that we pick up in terms of evolution , because our brains really haven't changed that much in hundreds of thousands of years , and it served us really well to be able to interpret subtle signals like the tone of something's voice or the tone of someone's tiny little expressions . There are things called micro expressions that the FBI sometimes studies to see if people are telling the truth .

Speaker 1 5:51

And people who are this sort of helper type , who have a lot of empathy and a lot of intuition , they tend to pick up on that . Even if they don't know what it is they're picking up on , they know how to interpret it . So you'll hear the way somebody says something or you'll see the way somebody's face looks and you won't quite know why , but you'll know they didn't like that and you won't be able to point to it on a screen or anything like that . But you'll just know . And there are plenty of people that can seem . Doesn't everybody know how to do that ? No , they absolutely don't . I'm sure you've run across people , maybe in the accounting department or maybe in the engineering department , who are not going to pick up on that kind of subtleties , and that's one of the reasons why we're talking to the customers and they're not .

Speaker 1 6:44

We all have our own skills . Believe me , there's nothing soft about it . It's something that can't really be taught and as AI becomes more and more prevalent , it's going to become more and more important , because people can sense authenticity , and it's not something that you can really teach a bot to do , because humans are not logical . We have our own motivations , and when you can see and hear those subtleties , you can work with it in a way that a machine can't . So

Chapter 3: Weaknesses of the Helper Personality

Speaker 1 7:20

all of those are really important and are really helpful to the job . That said , there are some ways that it can really get in your way and it can hurt you .

Speaker 1 7:32

So I want to talk about some of the weaknesses of being a helper personality and what you can do to work around them . One of the weaknesses is that we're extrinsically motivated , meaning we're looking for someone else to validate us in order to feel good . It's not something that's okay . I did this , I feel good about it and now I feel good today . We are reliant on someone else to make us feel good , even if that's just because we made them feel good . That need to be needed . It can lead to burnout pretty quickly .

Speaker 1 8:11

Needing approval in general can impact decision making . Something that goes hand in hand with helping people is we don't like them to be mad at us . We don't like people to be upset with us . So in needing that approval , that really puts us in a weaker position , because you're not necessarily going to be able to make the best decisions when your mind is clouded by oh , but this might make them mad at us , having an actual fear and anxiety attached to that . We all like to think that we're much more logical than we are , but if you ever pivoted what you were going to do , what you were going to say , because it seemed like someone was going to be mad at you , did you know that there were any real consequences besides them being mad at you ? If they're mad at me , then what ? Then they're going to tell the boss and the boss doesn't get to like us and we're going to get fired . Or they're going to tell us Other people won't like us , no one will talk to us , we won't be able to get our job done . We take that and then we run with it , when the real fact is , maybe they'll be annoyed for a minute , but

Chapter 4: Difficulty Saying No

Speaker 1 9:19

so long as we're doing our job and getting the results that we're supposed to get , someone else being annoyed with this is not going to make a huge difference in our lives and in our careers .

Speaker 1 9:34

We often have difficulty saying no , and here's a reason for it . We have a tendency not to ask people for help unless it is an absolute emergency we're drowning and even then we tend to be like , oh hey , would it be at all possible ? Like no pressure at all , would it be possible to help me with this ? And that's just not the case . When other people are asking us to do things , they just most of the time they just don't feel like doing it and would appreciate a little bit of help . I don't know about you , but that was just mind blowing to me that people just asked for help because they just didn't necessarily feel like doing it and thought maybe we could do it or thought maybe there wasn't that much on our plates . Great , we'd never . But just because you have waited too long does not mean that somebody else should be required to help you , just like you are not required to help someone else who has let it go too far for them . I know you want to help , I know you care , but there is no option to do all the things and do them well . You're going to have to pick , and when you choose something , whenever you say yes to something , you are automatically saying no to something else . You need to figure out when I say yes to this , what am I saying no to ? If I say no to this , what can I say yes to ? Those are two incredibly important questions to be asked yourself .

Speaker 1 11:02

Another thing is we tend to be just a wee bit unrealistic as to what we can actually accomplish Now . The reason for this is because we tend to be very accomplished people . If we just worked hard enough , we could get it done most of the time At a certain point in life . That is no longer the case . You don't win an award for doing all the things . We also , just as humans , tend to overestimate what is possible physically and mentally to do in a day . I've heard the phrase we overestimate what we can do in a day and we underestimate what we can do in a lifetime . And it's hard . You want to do all these things . You want to be able to do all these things . It seems like each thing should be neatly slotted into an hour , and why should it take more than one of my favorite ?

Speaker 1 11:54

I don't know if it's a meme , whatever you'd want to call it , but I chose a person saying to themself I think I can do three things today , and you see a cartoon in the brain walking up and saying you can do one . The person says no , I really think that if I plan

Chapter 5: Unrealistic Expectation

Speaker 1 12:07

my time out carefully , I can . And the brain interrupts and says you know what ? Now we're not going to do any of them . And that is pretty true . We are too often . We get excited by so many things , we want to help so many people , that we end up saying yes to too many things . And in doing that , it's every time . We say yes , we start to build a bridge and it's one or two steps across that bridge that we build it . But then we say yes to something else and we start building one or two steps of that bridge and before you know it , we have 15 starts of a bridge to get from one side to the other without any of them going all the way across .

Speaker 1 12:49

What happens with that is you're really busy , you feel really torn and over committed and tired and yet you haven't accomplished a damn thing . You think you're really nice and really ineffective . Another part of it is we can be a little bit emotionally manipulative , not on purpose . I don't think that people with this type of personality go like all right , I'm going to cry now and I'm going to make them feel really bad . But there can be an element of martyrdom where it's just oh , I work harder than anybody , why can't anyone see how hard I'm working ? Why are they asking me to do this ? Because you say yes , that's not on them . So when you're feeling that you work harder than people , that your opinion is essential to everyone , and even just saying yes to something because you want people to like you instead of thinking that it's in the best interest of the company , that does count as emotional manipulation . It's also not what gets people to like you when you think about how you decide what you like . Respect someone is that based on how much are they willing to do for me ? Well , it's . Does what they say and do make sense ? Are they aligned with what they believe in ? Do my beliefs align with their beliefs ? Do I like the things that they do ? Do I admire them ? It's not . Are they a really good assistant ?

Speaker 1 14:20

So , with all of this , what can happen is we can start to neglect self-care . I didn't think that I did this

Chapter 6: Neglecting Self-Care

Speaker 1 14:28

until I started thinking about what would count as self-care . Like I still ate , I still showered , I still slept , but I didn't do any of those things as well as I should have . Maybe I showered as well as I should have , but like I wouldn't . I would have planned to cook dinner , but then I would order something and it wouldn't be healthy because I just I was too exhausted after all the work I did , or I would stay up an extra couple hours because I wanted to finish the work that I had and I didn't want it looming over my head the next day and because that felt like a choice and because I wanted to do it . It didn't seem like it was neglecting self-care , but it really was , and the thing is that the people around me suffered because I would .

Speaker 1 15:22

I was excited by all I was committed to , especially when I was a new leader and I really wanted to impress everyone , and it felt like I was doing all this for my family . But they were the ones I ended up being really snappy with . They were the ones that I ended up presenting when they needed or wanted things for me , like my little kids . Of course , they need things for me . They're entitled to need things from me . 40-year-old adults not as much . But it just felt like , oh my God , another person wants more things for me . Like I'm at home , can I get a freaking break ? No , not in the season of my life . So if I need to do less , it can't be with four seven-year-olds who can't feed themselves . Not really something reasonable to resent .

Speaker 1 16:16

In CS in general , this can sneak up on you really fast Because we touch the customer , we're customer facing and pretty much everything that everyone else does relates to the customer in some way . We are asked to do things for all these departments because , well , it relates to the customer and because a lot of people don't understand what

Chapter 7: Overcommitment in CS

Speaker 1 16:42

we really do , just more and more things get added to our plate . If you're the type of person who wants to be helpful both to the customer and to your company , you're going to get to the point where you have overcommitted really quickly , and it's a major danger in CS . This is especially true for new leaders , because what a lot of this comes down to is saying no , we don't like it and we have to do it . And if you're a new leader , if you've only been an individual contributor before in IC , you really haven't necessarily had the option to say no . But as a leader , it becomes more and more important for you to say no .

Speaker 1 17:27

And the higher up you move in a company , the more often you have to say no , because people are going to be asking you for things left and right and if you say yes to them , you're going to

Chapter 8: Prioritization and NRR

Speaker 1 17:38

run out of time , you're going to run out of money . You have to make choices . That's what you do as a leader . That first choice that you make is with how you spend your time . It gets on prioritization , and priorities are really what helps you out of all this . It's what takes the feelings out of it . What are you tasked with ? What is your number one goal ? That is your job . That says OK , if this is going well , that means you're successful . So in CS generally right now , that's net revenue retention . So if this number is going up , that means you're doing your job .

Speaker 1 18:16

When you're looking at all the things you have to do and whether you're going to say yes to something or not , you have to ask yourself first and foremost does this impact NRR ? Will this help me move the needle in the right direction on NRR , or immediately , or does this build the foundation for me to create a machine that does that , a department , a motion that does that ? And if the answer is no , you need to either put it in a parking lot , which means you're saying I would love to do this , but I can't right now because it doesn't align with my priorities , or you need to say this is really important , and I see that , and because I can't do it , I think it's important that we find someone who can't , so that's something that you can help with

Chapter 9: Clear Lines of Work in CS

Speaker 1 19:04

, that you can discuss with people , but you are not the only person who can solve every problem , and if you try to , you're not going to be effective at solving any of them . So here's how this plays out in CS , especially right now , because there aren't clear lines of what CS should work on and what they shouldn't . I'm very clear on what they should and what they shouldn't , but a lot of companies aren't , so that probably doesn't help you a whole lot . That I'm clear on .

Speaker 1 19:37

In a lot of companies , you're going to get asked to do 30 different things at once , and if you're just trying to be a team player and make them wonder how they ever operate it without you , you're probably going to say yes to all of them , but you're going to be leaving out your long-term strategic work Now . I know that feels like it can always get pushed for a day . This person's really upset . This person really needs me right now . I can really make a big difference for them right now . So I'm going to work on this today instead of segmentation . That can wait for a day . Yeah , we have to do the customer journey , but that's going to take a long time and this is something I could do right now . That would make a big impact .

Speaker 1 20:17

Watch how much you get done . When you're saying that every day You're helping other people do their work , but your work is never getting done . And it's great to be a team player , but guess who gets credit when their work gets done and yours doesn't ?

Chapter 10: Saying No as a New Leader

Speaker 1 20:32

It's not you for being a team player that they get it done and you don't . And at the end of the day , your numbers matter and your numbers speak to how much you're helping both the customer and the company . This can be doubly true for new leaders , who I work with a lot . So new leaders don't necessarily know or they're not used to being able to say no , because when you're an individual contributor , you're kind of limited in . You're given work , you're told what to do . You say aye , aye , captain , and you do the best you can with it .

Speaker 1 21:05

As a leader , you have to start saying , all right , I've been asked to do all these different things . This is the most important thing . I know the most about this . This is the route we have to go . We're gonna say no to other things and yes to this . You can't just say yes to whatever anyone throws at you and think that you're still going to be able to execute on that , because you can't . Yes , you're allowed to say no . No one's gonna be like , oh , you're not a team player , it's literally part of your job .

Speaker 1 21:34

Now it would be really easy to just say , all right , here's the time management , things that you need to work on and get some boundaries , and there you go , all better . I've read a lot of books and articles and things that do that . How I like to get a little bit different here is looking at how can you change your thoughts , look at it from a different perspective that kind of leans in to what you already believe in terms of the intrinsic motivation part of it . One thing that's interesting about that is asking yourself would you feel great about doing this if no one ever knew that you did it ? Is the help this is going to cause actually motivating to you ? Is the end result motivating to you , or do you just care about what that person thinks ? So that's an important thing . So a few actionable tips to take with

Chapter 11: How to Say No Effectively

Speaker 1 22:31

you on your way when you have to say no . Here's the best way to do it .

Speaker 1 22:36

The reason that most people get upset when you have to say no to something is that they think that you're saying that your work is more important than theirs . So if you're like , oh no , I can't , I'm too busy , what they take it as is my work is more important than your work . I can't stop my work because it's more important . And what that does is it triggers some insecurities in that person . Again , this is back to evolutionary psychology . It triggers a fight or flight because , whether we think about it or not , we associate our jobs as being part of our survival . It's how we get money , it's how we eat , it's how we have shelter .

Speaker 1 23:18

The minute you seem suggest that someone's work is less important than yours , they start thinking your work's not more important than mine . Do other people think your work is more important than mine oh my God , I'm gonna get fired and all of a sudden they're angry . Now they don't have those thoughts in a concrete , linear way . It's like they happen in a second , in a flash in their head and all of a sudden they're pissed off . But that's the why . So if you can take away that hint of a threat or that sense that you think you're better than them because you don't , you're just trying to get your own work done , show them that you understand that their work is important .

Speaker 1 23:59

So saying something like wow , that sounds like an amazing project . I know it's going to be huge help with XYZ . I wish I could . I am just buried . I would not be able to do good work on it because I am just too underwater , but I really want to hear how that goes . Good luck with that . Okay , no one gets mad at that . They really don't . They get mad when you're like I can't , sorry , too busy . It's all in how you say it . So here are my final

Chapter 12: Taking Care of Yourself

Speaker 1 24:28

tips .

Speaker 1 24:29

You have to do things that make sure that your needs are met first . You know that whole airplane put your mask on before you put the mask on your children . They say that because it's not going to be your instinct to put your mask on first , but if you don't , you literally can't help other people . You will not have enough oxygen to be able to help other people effectively , and it's the same thing with helping others in your company . If you aren't taking time for yourself , to rest , to eat , to shower , to be a human being outside of just someone who's accomplishing tasks , your ability to help others , which is something that's important to you , is going to be severely limited . It's also going to be limited if you're not getting your own work done , because you're not going to be at that job very long if that's the case .

Speaker 1 25:21

So focus on taking care of yourself and focus on making sure your own work gets done , and then you can help other people with their work , and then pick an accountability buddy who also needs to work on this , and by doing that , you can commit saying all right , I'm only doing these two things and then the rest of my day is going to be what it normally consists of . It's going to be going to cross functional meetings . It's going to be meeting with my employees for their one-on-ones . It's my weekly meetings .

Chapter 13: Accountability and Helping Others

Speaker 1 25:51

It's answering emails . It's all the regular day-to-day work that you're going to be doing anyway , but it's important to have someone else to hold you to this , mainly because if you're somebody who is extrinsically motivated , why not lean into that ? Use it .

Speaker 1 26:08

Don't try and do everything on your own . Be buddies with someone where you're helping each other , stay accountable on this , and then you can get that dopamine hit of . Hey , I helped someone else by connecting with them on this today and they helped me , and that made them feel good too . And finally , when you find something that you want to help with and you think that you probably shouldn't or you can't tell , ask yourself these questions If I say yes to this , what am I saying no to ? And then , when you've answered that , if I say no

Conclusion

Speaker 1 26:41

to this , what can I say yes to ? Those are really powerful questions . Don't answer them in your head . Write them down , do it like a T on a piece of paper what am I saying no to ? What am I saying yes to ? And ask yourself does this need to be done ? Does it need to be done now and does it need to be done by me ? All right , do all that . Get an accountability partner and start helping yourself at least a fraction as much as you help everybody else , and we will all win .

Speaker 1 27:14

Thanks so much for joining me today for another episode of Psychology of Customer Success . If you loved it and want me to make more , make sure you rate it five stars and give it a review on old iTunes , so I know it makes sense to keep doing it . I hope so , because I really enjoyed it . And if you want more from me , make sure you're on my insiders list , where I send you actionable tips on CS strategy and leadership based on how humans really work , and that'll be linked in the show notes . Next week on the show , we'll be talking about why we butt heads with oh practically every other department and what to do about it . Until then , take care of yourself , get some rest and share this episode with your CS Bestie . Bye .