Even prior to joining their ranks, Workiva’s customer-first mentality impressed Penny Ashley-Lawrence. 

“I was listening to earnings calls from Workiva before I joined, and the CEO and the CTO both mentioned the customer success department more than five times on these calls,” Ashley-Lawrence said. “I knew that’s where I wanted to go. I wanted to work for a company that valued customer success and understood it was more than a department — it was a way of life.”

Admiration turned into reality nearly two years ago when she joined the financial reporting and compliance software company as vice president of customer success. And since a variety of teams directly or indirectly play a fundamental role in the customer journey, successful cross-collaboration is crucial for Ashley-Lawrence.

“We try to instill that customer success is a concept and not just a department, and we all own that experience,” Ashley-Lawrence said. “But customer success leads the way in owning that relationship with the customers and helping the customers understand who we are.”

For Ashley-Lawrence and her team, that can translate into working with marketing to massage messaging and help segment customer bases; relaying client feedback to product teams; working with sales to stay abreast of customer experience; and even IT, to ensure operations are firing on all cylinders. Without successful cross-collaboration, communications and strategy can break down to potentially detrimental effects. 

Nevertheless, it’s a discipline that can be more easily preached than practiced. In an interview with Built In Colorado, Ashley-Lawrence details how successful cross-collaborations requires getting buy-in from internal stakeholders, soaking up institutional knowledge and adopting a team-first mentality that checks egos at the door.

What informs your approach to cross-collaboration?

Ashley-Lawrence: I think it comes from my background as an athlete. It’s about the team. In general, my leadership philosophy is to lead and not to manage. There’s time for managing. But once you have your team and you find your rhythm, you can lead more than manage. I fundamentally believe that I work for my team, not the other way around. They have metrics, and goals and know what they need to do. My job is to choreograph and remove obstacles. The best coaches gave me the skills and put me in a position to succeed, but it was up to me to execute.

Day to day, how do you ensure you’re leading more than managing?

When I first started with Workiva, nobody knew me. I didn’t ask anything of anybody other than to help me understand. I asked them simple questions: How do you know you had a great week? How do you know you had a great year? What’s something that you haven't done yet here that you want to do?  I launched a 36-month vision to the entire department. Instead of saying, ‘This is the game we’re playing today,’ we said, ‘What do we want to be in three years? And what do we not want to be?’ 

If you can get people to buy into your vision and be a part of it, they will manage themselves. We have over 20 metrics that we use for different parts of the business and for different teams. With those metrics, sales, product and even HR know what they need to do to have a good week. They can look at a dashboard and understand that it’s tied to this bigger vision of how important they are to the company and how important they are to the success of our customers.

What does that look like in practice?

It’s pretty tactical. My team has a one-pager that describes what we’re trying to accomplish this year, and we update it every year. I share that with other teams. 

I also invite them to our CS all-hands meetings, and I ask if I can come to their department’s all-hands meetings and present to their teams. I present our metrics and explain what I need from them to help me hit those metrics. And I ask how I can help them hit their metrics. I’ve asked my CEO to let me present at company all-hands so I can talk to the whole company about what we’re trying to do. It’s really around sharing metrics, sharing your plan on the page for the year and asking other departments how you can help them.

What are the benefits of successful cross-collaboration?

The customer can sense when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. They lose faith in your brand if they get different answers. If a customer calls Workiva, they could call support, their customer success manager,  sales, our CEO — and they should get the same answer to the same question every time. If we’re not working cross-functionally, that’s not going to happen. 

The customer journey is not always a straight line. There are always going to be tough situations to work through, and though they aren’t ideal, that’s when cross-collaboration is critical and really pays off.
 

If you want to truly cross-collaborate, you have to be willing to put yourself out there for criticism and ask how you can be better.”

What challenges arise when cross-collaborating and how do you overcome those?

The number one challenge is when people have conversations with customers and they don’t document it. Documenting the customer journey is critical everywhere I’ve worked. Ways I’ve overcome this include incentivizing for great documentation and providing tools to make it easier. 

I show teams the metrics that I share with the C-suite. That helps them understand that if they don’t document it, I won’t be able to tell the story about the amazing work they’re doing. That resonates. It’s one of the fundamentals — you’re not going to win a basketball game if you don't practice free throws when you’re tired. 

What advice do you have for leaders looking to band their teams together? 

Make sure people understand what you're trying to solve for the customer and how you are measuring it. Go into every conversation with metrics, a business case and solid data. If somebody criticizes or questions it, be grateful for it and come back with a better story. If you want to truly cross-collaborate, you have to be willing to put yourself out there for criticism and ask how you can be better. And stand on the stage and tell the world how great your team is. You do that with the metrics — people will buy into it and they’ll want to help.