One of my responsibilities at Toast is to lead the internal teams responsible for enabling each of our Customer Success (CS) new hires. Given that we are hiring 50+ CS people a month – a majority of whom are in one of three roles – this is a key function for Toast as those employees will be the “names and faces” of Toast to our customers, interacting with them on a daily basis and will have a true impact on Toast’s overall success.

As Toast has scaled through the years, our CS Enablement teams (Restaurant Success, Support and Services) have built a set of traditional lecture-based, instructor-led programs that have been very successful to date. However, given our current scale needs and future company forecasts (growing over 100% YoY!), it is essential that we as a team transform how we teach and enable our new CS Toasters to help recognize that future vision.

We will need to be able to ramp up hundreds of people, across numerous roles, quickly and in a scalable manner. Our current Instructor Led Training approach won’t be able to support our future needs due to its person-power limitations and fixed schedule. We will have to be more nimble and bring training to our new team members, rather than have them come to us. In short, it is time for a change.

Transformative change driven by tactical execution teams can be a challenge. This is because at this point in their career they have seldomly been asked to think strategically. Like any other skill, it is built through practice and repetition. In my experience, to help such a team open themselves up to a different perspective and shift their current thinking – which is essential to real transformative change – the first exercise we start with is developing a Vision/Mission statement.

This exercise is an iterative process where we start with our corporate and team goals. Once those are acknowledged and understood by the team, we then brainstorm on bold ideas that will define what the future would look like, generate terms and words that represent that future state and then assemble them into a Vision/Mission statement. This is often not a comfortable exercise for the participants as it is new for them, but if you are truly encouraging of a “risk free zone” where people feel comfortable sharing any and all ideas, it is amazing what they can come up with.

Side note here – I realize that Vision and Mission are different but for the purpose of this post, I am using them in a combined sense. It is often more challenging for a tactically-focused team to create a true Vision statement given its lofty ideals, than it is to create a Mission statement that will help guide them for the next 6 – 18 months. However, I want them to be thinking BIG, so by couching it as a Vision/Mission statement, we don’t get too hung up on the semantics and produce something aspirational that we can use going forward. If you want to explore the differences between a Vision and Mission statement, you can do so here.

Our Toast CS Enablement teams are embarking on our “Toast CS Enablement 2.0” efforts this month. I will follow up with a future post to let you know what we come up with! It is an exciting time for our teams!