Effective Leaders Know How to Embrace Change for Excellence

The following is adapted from The Rack We Built.

The server-hosting market was fiercely competitive when I joined the managed hosting company Rackspace in 2001. Everyone was trying to differentiate themselves by either having the lowest price or the fanciest hardware. 

Rackspace was a lean, scrappy organization led by innately innovative entrepreneurs in both our founders and leadership team. They lived the core values every day, driven first and foremost to always look for ways to improve the business and the employee experience—in other words, to embrace change for excellence. 

While every business’ core values are different, I’ve noticed that the most effective leaders know how to embrace change for excellence. It’s one of the most important traits that an entrepreneur, manager, or team leader could have. Here’s how some of Rackspace’s most innovative leaders put this principle into play, plus some insights into how embracing change for excellence can take your business to the next level

Change vs. Change for Excellence

First, I want to set something straight. Change is a delicate dance, and there’s a difference between change for change’s sake and change for excellence. Leaders have to embrace change if they want to adapt and innovate. But all too often, I’ve seen leaders get seduced by the newest, shiniest methods or objects, instead of taking time to think, Is this change going to lead to progress? 

Every change you make should be a change for excellence. That’s especially true because every time you make a change, you’re going to be pulling against the tide. The truth is no one likes change. Don’t believe me? Ask someone to move to a new desk twice in a month and see what happens. People guard the familiar like a junkyard dog. 

So when your company is growing fast, you are going to have to handle a massive amount of change and, as a result, lots of employee pain. The best thing to do is to over-communicate the Why. You need to be prepared to explain, re-explain, and explain again.

You also need to beware of change-fatigue. Change too much during a certain amount of time, and you will give your team whiplash. It’s a delicate dance, but as a leader, you have to know when progress is worth the discomfort of change. 

Embrace Change by Listening 

When I joined Rackspace as an account manager, we were organized in teams, but everyone performed as a lone wolf. The unspoken rule was that everyone was to try and hide from the customers unless forced otherwise. When something went wrong for a customer, the account manager was the one to make or take the dreaded phone call. 

It was difficult for me, as an account manager, to get help on complicated issues. If a customer’s hard drive went down, I had to get an engineer on the phone to figure the problem out, then call the data center where the actual servers were located and schedule maintenance to replace the hard drive. No one was incentivized to help me or my customers, leading to a lot of frustration for everyone.

One day, David Bryce, the VP of Customer Care, came up with one of the most game-changing ideas ever. David couldn’t connect his all-in-one printer to his computer. When he called the printer company, they said, “You have an all-in-one printer, so you need to call all-in-one support.” He called all-in-one support, and they said, “You have a Mac. You need to call all-in-one support for Mac.” The company had organized their support around themselves, not the customer. 

David didn’t want Rackspace customers to have that kind of support experience, so the first thing he did was find out what changes we could make that would have the most impact on the customers’ experience. The leadership team began calling customers every week to check on them and ask what Rackspace could do better. 

Leadership isn’t about pulling innovative ideas out of thin air. It’s about listening to what the people around you need in order to do their jobs better and feel more valued in the process. The most effective changes will have a direct impact on those needs. 

Change for Excellence Benefits Everyone

On one of David’s first customer calls, he spoke with a graphic designer in Louisiana who said, “When I call Rackspace, I get a different person every time I call, and I have to explain everything all over again.”

The customer support leadership then created cross-functional teams that were incentivized, metrics-wise, on the growth of the team as a mini-company. That meant when customers would call in, they would automatically be routed to their assigned team. And to make sure we never had a situation like David’s printer story, we made sure every team was a one-stop shop. That meant having all the roles and expertise necessary to take care of whatever the customer threw at us. 

That was a massive organizational change that we all had to embrace, but in the end, it was massively successful—not only for the customer, whose interests were at the heart of the change, but also for team members like me, who had struggled to connect the dots during customer service calls. 

It also gave our team members a lot more ownership over our day-to-day operations, which made us feel even more valuable to the company. I was on Team A. We had around a thousand customers, which made it a $1.2 million a year business. My brain short-circuited when I realized I wasn’t just  twenty-year-old Lorenzo Gomez; I was the CEO of Team A. From that moment, I felt like every single server that we managed was my server. It was my company. 

The day that plan rolled out, everything changed. In my entire career, I have never seen a change in people’s attitudes as dramatic as that day. Engineers who you couldn’t beg to help you the day before all of a sudden couldn’t wait to get on the phone with me.

When change is truly oriented toward excellence, it benefits everyone, not just the individual customer or the business’ bottom line. 

Turn Change into a Real-Life Business Win

Most people struggle with change, especially when it comes to their job and how they do their work. Rackspace’s business was built on the ever-changing internet world and our primary core value, embrace change for excellence, reflected that. 

With the cross-functional teams, we changed our physical seats and were surrounded by people who did different jobs. We lost the departmental safety net to become that mini-company in the company. If you were a billing person, you no longer sat with your billing buddies but with an engineer, an account manager, and a sales guy. You were on your own, but on a team. 

I love this story because when the business demanded it, we took the word “change” off the conference room wall and turned it into a real-life business win. It was radical and risky as hell, but we did it anyway—and it worked. All because we embraced change for excellence. 

For more advice on effective leadership, you can find The Rack We Built on Amazon.

Lorenzo Gomez was one of the first one-hundred employees hired at Rackspace. During his nine years there, he served as a team leader and senior manager, pioneered the account manager/business development consultant split, and finished as a director of project management. As one of the leaders in creating San Antonio’s tech scene, Lorenzo deployed the principles he learned at Rackspace as CEO of Geekdom and chairman of the 80/20 Foundation. In addition to his work, Lorenzo has authored two Amazon bestsellers: The Cilantro Diaries in 2017 and Tafolla Toro in 2019.