Center for Leadership
Studies

Nigel Crabb is Program Director for Customer Success and Support Team of the IBM Software Group, a business Intelligence and Performance Management Sector for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Crabb’s breakthrough MAOL initiative centered on driving efficiencies in the way in which customer support was delivered within his organization. At the initiative’s outset he couldn’t have known that his mission to increase per-capita renewal revenue for support contracts would not only slash resolution time dramatically, but would also decrease his organization’s issues backlog by 50 percent—a number that has never risen back up.

“In organizations it is very easy to reach a sort of stage of stasis where you’re ticking along and everything’s working fine; crises come and go, you react, you put in short term fixes, and you move on—that’s normal management stuff,” Crabb explains. “My MAOL initiative, though, was about exercising leadership skills and breaking away from equilibrium—it was about generating in order to break through it.”

The team developed by Crabb focused on decreasing customer issue resolution time by challenging the way the company worked and asking why problems weren’t being resolved. Through that inquiry, Crabb was able to help his team restructure and reorganize the business. Crabb’s support team focused on same-day resolution, holding it to be true that there was no reason that they shouldn’t or couldn’t resolve issues the same day that customers came to them with problems. With a new ethos, the team reduced the issues backlog quickly and permanently and even now, more than a year later, customers are more satisfied—and so is Crabb’s team.

“Support analysts come into work every day with half of the load they were used to, which allows them to feel better about their jobs and to focus on creating knowledge assets.” Crabb Says.

Crabb avers that the tools and frameworks with which he was equipped in the MAOL were what allowed him to creatively orchestrate his initiative and incite breakthrough change. The material surprised and stretched him, and presented an opportunity to have new conversations and access material to which he might never otherwise have been exposed. Most of all, Crabb has developed his ability to create new leaders within his organization and see positive changes through them.

“I’ve always been a fan of hiring people who are better than me, and I understand more fully now that my success comes through the success of others. In the MAOL that idea was developed to a point of maturity in me that wouldn’t have been developed in any other way. I see leadership as being about succeeding through others and achieving breakthrough through helping others grow.”