Every function that doesn't get funded eventually develops a virtue that describes its own deficit.
You can hear it in the vocabulary. Scrappy. Resourceful. Close to the customer. Great instincts. Real relationships. Knows the accounts cold.
Every one of those is a compliment. Every one of them is also a description of what a capable person does when the system they needed was never built.
What is actually being praised
Take the expansion conversation, since that's the one I care about.
Somebody is supposed to reach out when the customer is ready for the next thing. Ready isn't a mood. It means something specific happened: they hit the milestone, the usage pattern changed, the thing they told you nine months ago they were working toward actually landed.
Something has to observe that. In most companies nothing does.
So what's left is a person. Somebody who pays attention, remembers what the customer said on a call three quarters back, notices that it just came true, and picks up the phone. That's a genuine skill and I'm not being sarcastic about it. It also doesn't survive contact with more accounts than one human can hold in their head, and it leaves with them when they quit.
The company calls that intuition, and admires it.
Praise closes the conversation that criticism would have opened
Here's the part that took me a while to see properly.
If a company said out loud that its team was bad at spotting expansion moments, somebody would have to do something. That's a problem statement, and problem statements attract budget. Somebody builds a trigger, somebody instruments a signal, somebody owns a number.
Instead the company says its CSMs have great instincts.
Now there's nothing to fix. A missing system has been converted into a personal quality, and nobody funds a personal quality. You commend it in a review and move on. The person being praised can't ask for the tool either, because asking would mean admitting that the thing they're admired for is a workaround.
So the compliment is what makes the deficit permanent. Not the neglect. The praise.
This is why everyone believes and nobody builds. It isn't that leaders think expansion doesn't matter. It's that the absence of machinery stopped looking like an absence the moment it acquired a flattering name.
The test, and it takes about a minute
Pick the thing your team is complimented for. Then ask what you would be asking for if nobody had ever complimented it.
Great instincts about which accounts are ready becomes: we have no readiness signal, and we need one.
Really close to their customers becomes: our coverage model is one person carrying context that exists nowhere else, and we should write it down.
Scrappy becomes: understaffed, and compensating.
The translation is always available. It just never gets made, because the first version sounds like a strength and the second one sounds like a request.
What it looks like when the thing gets built
The instinct doesn't get replaced. That's the part people brace for, and it's wrong.
Instrument readiness and you have a signal that fires when the customer reaches a milestone that means something. Attach an earned offer to it. Now the CSM isn't scanning two hundred accounts hoping to catch the moment. The moment arrives with a name on it, and they walk into a conversation they're actually prepared for.
Everything they were good at is still required. Reading the room, knowing what this particular customer cares about, saying the thing the right way. None of that can be automated and none of it should be. It just finally has something to aim at, on the day it matters, rather than being the entire method.
That's the difference between a motion and a personality trait. One of them survives the person leaving.
The empathy was never the problem. Making it the whole strategy was.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.