The Five Directions Every Great CS Leader Leads In

You lead your team well. You really do. You run tight one-on-ones. You develop your people. You protect them from the chaos coming down from above. Your team would run through a wall for you. And yet somehow, when the big decisions get made, about headcount, about strategy, about where the company is placing its bets, you find out after the fact. You’re in the room, but you’re not really in the room. Your peers in sales and product are shaping the narrative and you’re reacting to it. And you can’t figure out why, because you’re working harder than any of them. I’m going to tell you why. Because leadership in customer success isn’t just about leading your team. It’s about leading in five different directions all at once. And most of us get really good at one or two of them, usually leading our team or leading the function. And we assume that if we just do that well enough, everything else will follow. It doesn’t. The direction you neglect becomes the ceiling on everything else that you’re trying to build. So today, we’re mapping all the five directions. Leading the function, leading up, leading across, leading the team, and leading yourself. By the end, you’ll know exactly which direction has been your blind spot and why fixing it changes how much weight you carry inside your company. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to the CS RevSpeak podcast. I’m Angeline Gavino. I spent 17 years leading customer success inside B2B SaaS, most recently as a VP of CS. And today I coach customer success leaders one on one on the exact challenges you’re navigating right now. Everything I share in this podcast comes from time actually doing the work and time spent helping other leaders lead better. I talk about building credibility, turning customer success into a revenue engine, scaling your team, and navigating the leadership challenges nobody prepares you for. Let’s dive into today’s episode.

The first direction is leading the function itself. It means defining what customer success is for at your company and designing the strategy and operating model that makes the definition real. Every company has a working idea of what customer success is for. And the question is whether you wrote it or someone else did. Because if you didn’t, your CRO did, or your CEO did, or it got absorbed by default into whatever the last person in your seat set up. And usually, that inherited definition is small. Customer success as the team that keeps customers happy. CS as the safety net for bad fit deals. CS as a cost line leadership tolerates but doesn’t invest in. Leading the function means you own the answer to what customer success is accountable for, what it isn’t, and what it’s genuinely here to drive. Does CS own renewals? Who owns expansion? What outcomes are you on the hook for? And what are you explicitly not? What does CS do versus what the other cross-functional teams do?

Then the design. This is where you turn that mandate into something that runs. How is your book segmented? What’s the coverage model for each tier? High touch, low touch, digital touch? Who sits where? What are the core functions? What are the core motions your team runs? Onboarding, adoption, renewal, expansion, recovery? And how are they actually built? What’s the metrics architecture, the leading indicators you watch versus the lagging outcomes that you report? For most CS leaders, this is your strongest suit. You got the leadership role because you’re great at customer success. You know the best practices. The real challenge is knowing what to build now versus what to build later. CS looks different in a one person team than it does in a team of 20. So the model has to fit the stage you’re actually in. And part of being a good leader is knowing how to architect a CS org with intention and conviction. Because when you’re good at this, you can defend your strategy to the leadership team and to the board.

The second direction is leading up, managing the relationship with the people above you, your CEO, your CRO, your CFO, whoever it is you report to, and your board. Now a lot of leaders hear leading up and think it means managing up, which has this slightly icky connotation of politics and telling people what they want to hear. That’s not it. Leading up is about shaping what leadership believes is true about your part of the business before they form that belief without you. Here’s the trap I see constantly. A CS leader waits to be asked. They wait for the planning cycle. They wait for the board prep request. They wait for someone upstairs to come looking for the retention story, the revenue story. And by the time that request comes, the narrative has already hardened somewhere else. The CRO has already told the CEO that churn showing up is a product problem or a CS execution problem. And now you’re on defense trying to correct a story that’s already been told.

Leading up means you’re proactively feeding the executive conversation. You’re the one who walks in and says, here’s what our net revenue retention is telling us. Here’s the leading indicator I’m watching. Here’s the risk I see forming two quarters out. And here’s what I need to get ahead of it. You’re bringing the insight before anyone asks. In the language leadership actually cares about, which is revenue, risk, and growth. The gap here is almost never that the leader lacks the data. It’s that they’re translating it into CS language instead of executive language. So it lands as noise. And once you fix the translation, the same person who felt invisible in exec meetings starts getting pulled into the strategy conversations. The core move is anticipation. You lead up by seeing around the corner and bringing that visibility to the people whose job is to worry about the whole business, not just your slice of it.

The third direction is leading across. This is influence with your peers: sales, product, marketing, finance, support, the people you have zero authority over and complete dependence on. Think about how much of your success actually lives in other people’s org charts. Product decides whether the thing your customer was promised ever ships. Sales decides whether the customer you inherit was set up to succeed, or was a bad fit deal closed on a promise nobody can keep. Finance decides whether you get the headcount to serve the book you already have. Here’s where most CS leaders go wrong. They show up to cross-functional conversations as the complaint department. Sales oversold again. Product missed another deadline. Support is dropping tickets. And every one of those things might be true. But if that’s your posture, you’ve made yourself the person peers brace themselves before meeting with. You’ve traded influence for being right.

Leading across means you show up with a shared outcome, not a grievance. You go to your product counterpart with, here are the three feature gaps costing us the most expansion revenue, ranked with the dollar figures attached. Let’s decide together where this fits. You go to sales with, here’s what a great fit deal looks like based on who actually renews and expands. Let’s tighten the handoff so we both win. You’re building alignment around outcomes both of you are measured on so the other person leaves the room feeling like you made their job easier, not harder. The leaders who are genuinely powerful inside their companies are the ones other functions want in the room because they consistently make the whole system work better and everyone can feel it.

The fourth direction is the one you’re probably best at, leading the team. Now leading the team and managing the team are two different things. Managing is throughput. It’s making sure the work gets done, the accounts get covered, the fires get put out. Most of us are excellent at managing and we call it leading, but managing keeps the machine running. Leading builds the capability of the people inside it. Ask yourself, are my people more capable than they were six months ago or are they just busier? Because if your team is drowning and you’re the one bailing water alongside them, that feels like devoted leadership. It’s actually a capability gap you’re personally compensating for and it doesn’t scale. The moment that you step away or the moment the book grows, the whole thing wobbles.

Leading a team means you’re deliberately developing judgment, not just assigning tasks. You’re coaching your CSMs to think like owners of their book, to make the call themselves instead of routing every decision to you. You’re building the systems and the standards so quality doesn’t depend on you being in the room. You’re growing the next leaders under you, which by the way, is also how you free yourself up to lead in the other four directions. A leader who can’t delegate real judgment stays trapped inside their team forever and never gets to lead up or across at all. I see this pattern with leaders all the time. They know intellectually they should be developing their people, but they’re so buried in the day to day that coaching their team feels like a luxury they can’t afford. And once you name that trap out loud, that the firefighting is the thing preventing the capability that would end the firefighting, it tends to shift quickly. So leading the team is about building people who don’t need you on purpose. That’s the direction.

And the fifth direction is the one everyone skips, leading yourself. This is the foundation that the other four stand on and it’s invisible. So it’s the first thing to get sacrificed. Leading yourself is about your own clarity, your own energy, your own boundaries, and your own sense of where you’re actually going. You cannot lead a function with clarity if you have none for yourself. You cannot lead up with confidence if you’re running on empty and quietly questioning whether you even belong in the seat. You can’t lead your team steadily if you’re reactive and depleted because they feel your state before they hear your words. I see so many CS leaders operating from depletion and calling it dedication, answering Slack at 11 at night, absorbing everyone’s stress, never protecting the time to think. And they wear it like a badge. But a leader who’s running on fumes makes narrow, defensive, short term decisions.

Leading yourself starts with your leadership identity. Who are you as a leader? And what do you need to know when your company’s name isn’t on your badge? Because roles and companies restructure, the identity is the thing you carry from one seat to the next. And if you haven’t defined it, every transition feels like starting over. Part of that is knowing, honestly, what you’re great at and where you create the most value. What kind of org brings out your best work? Early stage build mode or scaling an established function? What kind of role actually fits how you lead? The leaders who thrive know their zone of genius and steer their careers towards it instead of taking whatever comes and hoping it fits. And then there’s protecting your energy, which sounds soft until you realize it’s the thing that makes everything else possible. Guarding your energy isn’t indulgent. It’s how you stay in the seat long enough to do the work that matters.

Nobody upstairs is going to hand you this clarity. It’s yours to build. And this is honestly one of the reasons I built Lead2Scale as a group. Leading yourself is nearly impossible in isolation. And most CS leaders are the only person at their level in their entire company. There’s no one who gets it. Being in a room with other leaders carrying the exact same weight does something that no framework can. It reminds you that the hard part isn’t just you. And it gives you people to think out loud with. That peer table is often where the clarity actually comes from.

So let’s bring it together. Five directions. First, leading the function. Define what CS is, design the strategy, and build the operating model underneath it. Second, leading up. Feed the executive narrative proactively in the language of revenue and risk. Third, leading across. Show up to your peers with shared outcomes instead of grievances, and become the leader other functions want in the room. Fourth, leading your team. Build capability and judgment. Develop people who don’t need you on purpose. And fifth, leading yourself. Protect your clarity and your energy because it’s the foundation everything else stands on. The point isn’t to be perfect in all five at once. Nobody is. The point is to see which direction you’ve been neglecting because that neglected direction is almost always the ceiling on the rest.

Here’s what I know after this episode: you already know which direction is your gap. You felt it while I was talking. Maybe you lead your team beautifully, but you’ve never actually designed your operating model. Maybe you’re strong on strategy, but invisible upstairs. Maybe you face outward in every direction, and you’ve completely stopped leading yourself. Seeing the gap is the easy part. Building the strength across all five directions. That’s the work. And it’s the exact work we do inside Lead2Scale. Lead2Scale is my group program for CS leaders who are ready to stop leading in just one or two directions and start carrying real weight across all five. We build the operating model together. We sharpen how you lead up and across. We work on how you develop your team and how you lead yourself in a room of other CS leaders who are carrying the same weight you are.

The next cohort starts on September 30th, and that timing is deliberate. The leaders who walk into 2027 with a real plan are the ones building it right now, not scrambling in December or January. That’s why one of the things you walk out of Lead2Scale with is your customer success 2027 plan. The strategy, the operating model, the direction you’re taking your function into next year, built and pressure tested with the room. The last day to enroll is September 29, so if this is landing, don’t sit on it. You can enroll at csrevspeak.com/l2s. That’s csrevspeak.com/l2s. And I’ll drop the link in the show notes. If you’re ready to lead in every direction, come build it with us. I hope to see you in the next cohort.