Risk-taking, creativity, and seven calendars: How a Customer Success leader navigates career, growth, and motherhood

How do you balance leading a team of 12, pursuing studies, and being a parent—all at once? In this episode of Real Talks, Lauren McMichael, Sr. Manager in Customer Success, shares her journey and the tips she’s collected along the way. 
 

Before joining a Customer Success team at Dynatrace five years ago, Lauren worked in various marketing and sales roles across different industries. Now, she is leading a team of 12 Customer Success Managers–all while completing a leadership course at Yale and becoming a mom for the third time. 

In this conversation, she talks about: 
 

•  How taking risks and switching paths can lead to a fulfilling career 
•  Why creativity plays a big role in a job you wouldn’t expect 
• The power of a rhythm in your calendar 

 
Enjoying the episode? Leave us a comment on Spotify, or rate it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

Where to find us:    

• Connect with Sue Quackenbush on LinkedIn
• Connect with Lauren McMichael on LinkedIn

Discover the opportunities at Dynatrace and take your career to the next level: careers.dynatrace.com

Transcript

Sue

Hi, my name is Sue Quackenbush and I am the Chief People Officer at Dynatrace. And today we start our fourth season of Real Talks with a great guest, Lauren McMichael. She is Senior Manager of Customer Success of Dynatrace One, based in Detroit.

Lauren

Thank you Sue. I'm so excited to be here on Real Talks. I've been waiting to be invited.

Sue

Well, I am excited to be speaking with you today and really look forward to having a great conversation about you and your career growth and your career insights. My understanding is that you've had roles in marketing. You've had roles in sales development, account management roles, and now you're in Customer Success, which is so critically important. And I would love to hear about, you know, what your current role is all about and what drives you in it.

Lauren

Yeah. So I have done many things. I have often felt like I'm a jack of all trades. So after doing a few different jobs in marketing and advertising, where I got to be very creative, which is one of my favorite things to do. I decided that maybe being more techie would be fun for me. And where the world was going, right? So I'm very happy to have landed at Dynatrace, because having all of these jobs that were very different in the last decade have now helped me to feel very comfortable in what I'm doing here.

But I decided that really working with customers and clients was where I found my passion.

Sue

So I love that. And sometimes people think about career path or career growth, and it's a set path, right? And you need to really define it. And what I heard from your background was you took the best of all your different experiences and really brought them together in the role that you have today and your creativity. I would have to imagine that you use your creativity a lot in your current role. So can you share, you know, how that creativity plays out in your role in focusing on customer success?

Speaker 3

Sure. I, I do feel that. I am creative every day. And a lot of it comes down to creative problem-solving, because that's really all our customers want us to do here is solve their problems. Um, so we were able to create this whole customer success organization.

Speaker 3

And, and now that I have moved into the management side of things. I help my team members with creative ways to manage their accounts, to communicate with their customers right there. So many times we have to be able to say things to our customers that they may not want to hear, and the creativity comes in because you have to come up with really positive ways to explain things that might not be so positive. And, you know, I have to get creative with making my my work life as balanced as possible, making sure that I'm doing things every day that give me joy, that help me feel valuable. So, you know, I feel like that's also a part of the creative puzzle.

Sue

And you touch upon balance and, you know, you're a mom of three. You have a you have a big team that you manage. You're a leader. How do you do it? I'd love to hear more on how do you ensure that that balance is there?

Lauren

Well, sometimes it's tricky. But yes, I am a planner. I'm a Virgo, and we're planners.

Lauren

I'm a triple Virgo, so I have about seven calendars. This is just, like, more anecdotal, like a little insight into who I am is like, I have, you know, my personal calendar, I have my professional calendar, we have a family joint calendar. I have a calendar on the wall in the kitchen because it has all of our sporting events with all our children on it. I have a written calendar and slash planner that I keep on my desk because I need to write down things feverishly all day long, right? To remind myself of things, people's birthdays. This thing I just promised my boss that I would take care of. Um, whose anniversary is coming, what vacations I need to remember to plan, a customer just reached out, and they're upset, and I need to help escalate. So there are so many things going on all the time. But you know I do firmly believe and I've learned this over many jobs and with managers and with school. Like everyone has to organize themselves in their own way. And you have to find your own rhythm, right?

Lauren

So someone told me that a long time ago. Like find your rhythm. So I want the people that I manage to make sure that when they look at their calendar, they see the rhythm. Right? So maybe some days you don't schedule meetings with customers. Maybe you give yourself a break at the end of every day. Um, I would say that some weeks I don't have any breaks and you know, I'm working from start to finish. And then as soon as I'm done working, I'm busy for four hours with my children, which is not a great way to live, because then at the end of the day, you're, like, fighting with your significant other, right? And everyone. But I do like to make sure that I have a balance in my calendar. So, you know, especially the days where I do have a lot of things going on after work with my family. Like, I want to make sure that I give myself a breaking point at, well, that's a play on words, right? It's my breaking point. And also a break where I can say, I have to stop at this time because I've got to prepare myself for the next phase of the day, which is family. And if I'm taking stress from the day with me into the family stuff, it's it's never good. So, you know, I do have to make sure that I put time in my plan for breathing and separating work and life. And of course, like it's 2025, we're connected all the time. So I also allow myself to do that. Right. So while I make sure that I have a rhythm to my calendar and I give myself the calendar that I need to survive, I also am on when I need to be. So if I have to stop working at four because family comes in, I'm still, you know, slacking with people and checking my emails and, um, and.

Then, you know, I give myself time off. But I also make sure that I have PTO where I don't talk to anyone, and I have PTO where I can kind of still stay on and find that balance as well. Like, I'm sorry if I'm going on too long about this, but I did just take a trip with my husband in the fall, and we went to Europe for the first time ever. We've never been overseas, and I did not bring my computer. It was the first time I was away from my computer for ten days. And that was incredible, but like, shut it down, you know, you have to give yourself time to shut it off and you have to be able to be on all the time because, like, this job in Dynatrace gives us the flexibility to be there for our families. So because I have that flexibility, I also like allow myself to be on whenever people need me.

Sue

Just listening to you, how do you juggle it all? And um, you took a yeah, leadership program and I'd love to just get your thoughts on what learnings did you take away from it that you're applying into in in your current leadership role?

Lauren

This is one of my favorite takeaways is learning about how emotion is something that's part of our lives. And we can't we can not have emotion at work, learning about just like the biology of how we all communicate with each other. And fear plays such a role into how people communicate. And you know, I've always found that I can read people very well. I'm very much interested in the psychology of organizations, and I want to be able to understand how different people communicate so that I can communicate with them the way that they will communicate. I find that this is really powerful and management, like understanding your people and knowing that this person, you know, will be very passive. This person will be more assertive, you know, how can I manage them with their characteristics in mind? So this leadership program really focused on that. It focused on goals and how you achieve them and setting the goals that you can actually track. And, you know, creating a hypothesis about how you want a goal to be achieved and really putting the science into it and and making sure that you can prove that you're changing and working towards something. And, you know, of course, Dynatrace is focused a lot on goal setting and, you know, making sure that we're reviewing those goals. And so it was all really perfect timing with what we were doing here. But I also came away just feeling stronger as a leader, but knowing that I really want to go back and get a master's in something related to that. So I've identified a program that's associated psychology. That's online, but I'm kind of waiting for my third child to be a little bit older because he's only two. So once I have, uh, like the tiniest bit more balance in my life than I might be able to focus in on that. But it was really powerful to, you know, have the certificate from Yale and say I achieved something.

Sue

Yeah. And it is, back to balance and growing and making sure that you're always moving forward. And, you know, when you when you think about, you know, you're managing a large team, you're balancing life, um, you're still growing. You're still learning that excitement and passion is in you. You can hear it, which is fabulous. You know, let's let's flip to some advice. Right. So someone listening this to this podcast, who's who's maybe, you know, in a sales development, uh, representative role or in customer success or in marketing some of the roles that you've taken, but like, what lessons, um, from your career did you wish you learned earlier?

Lauren

Oh, man. Many, you know, one of the things that I took a little bit longer to learn was that I don't know everything, and just staying open-minded and willing to hear things change and grow. Um, that was something that was challenging as a young person, like even going to school, and I would I'll never forget this, this one time when I was working at the ad agency and I had been taking a style learning about, you know, marketing or advertising, and I was so certain that what I was learning in school was the thing we needed to do at the ad agency. And one of my superiors, who had been doing it for like 40 years, was like, listen, we're going to do it this way. And I remember thinking to myself, like, man, I am just really quite arrogant and I think I know everything. And these people have been doing it forever. And there is something to be learned here. Right? So just because I think I'm hearing what is right doesn't mean that it is like these people have the experience. So I learned that I needed to like trust people that have experience and have done this before and know what they're doing. And so that's one thing I wish I would have known sooner, um, trusting people's experience, knowing that sometimes that's the thing that we need to be doing and being open minded and and watching and learning and growing from that. And, you know, another thing that I wish I would have known sooner is that you don't have to know what you want to do right now. And we're all trying to figure out what we want to do. I don't know that this is the end for me, right? Is this where my career stops? And I'm just going to stay here forever? And I don't know, I would love to work at Dynatrace forever. Honestly, I love Dynatrace, I love where we're going. I love Rick McConnell. I love, you know, so much of what's happening here. I love watching us grow and change. You know, maybe I can stay here forever, but I've often felt like hopping around and having this resume that has so much on it. I felt like that was a problem for a long time, but now I just embrace it like it's okay to try different things. It's okay not to know what industry you belong in. It's okay to take risks. Um, so, you know, all my risk taking has brought me here and I'm so happy with that.

Sue

Yeah, I agree, it is is definitely okay to take risks. Um, and then that's how you grow, right? Uh, at the end of the day, if you that you, you know, our lives are changing so, so quickly. Our world of work is changing. Um, and we're learning through that. But then added to that is when you do have an opportunity come your way and you take the risk to try it. I mean, um, I switched careers earlier on in my career. I never thought I would be where I am today or doing what I'm doing in the start of my career. Right. But, um, you know, I'm a big believer in always being open. Um, and there's a lot that someone can explore within an organization. And I agree with you. Dynatrace has tremendous opportunity for all of our, um, Dynatrace is in how the how do you navigate the different experiences and ultimately the different roles and focus that you have? Um, within Dynatrace, it's something I highly encourage everyone to do. Um, you know, I think the other thing I'd love to, to ask, um, you know, from a people leaders perspective, right? So a number of individuals who'll be listening to this may be thinking about becoming a people leader. And I'd love to get your thoughts like, was there something that triggered to say, yep, I'm ready to be a people leader, um, in your career? Or did it just happen? And you you figured it out. Love to just hear, like, did you wait? Because sometimes we're like, well, some people don't know if they're. Ready to take on people management. And, you know, I'd love to get your thoughts on how you transitioned.

Lauren

I, I'm trying to think of when I really knew that it was the right move. You know, I started managing people at the company before Dynatrace, and I was doing it in a few different ways. Um, it started on the Customer Success team. I was the lead, and I think part of that was that I was just really good at my job, and I, I mean, not to do my own horn. Well, yes, to do my own horn. I'm a really good customer success manager. I love talking to customers. I am really the most comfortable, you know, on the phone, chatting, making people laugh. I can lighten the mood very easily and like, that's, you know, that's how I break into relationships with people. And I want to be friends with everyone. And the more friendly I am, the easier it is to tell them hard news, you know? And, uh, so I was good. And that doesn't necessarily mean people can manage. Right. And we always joke around like Michael Scott from The Office, my favorite show. Um, you know, Michael Scott was a great salesman, terrible manager. And so you don't want to fall into that trap. But I knew, like from being a great CSM and helping my peers, right. It just starts off with helping people, which I like to do. It's another thing I'm super passionate about. I just want to be helpful. So I was really great at helping people figure out like what they needed to say, what they needed to do, how I would might try something. Um, and, and I really like doing that. And then our startup needed an SDR manager, and I had done that work before, and I was able to be on the hiring management team. And, um, I hired to incredible women. You know, we were small, but we were making calls and we were trying things out and we had a lot of fun. And I will say, I'm proud to say that those two women, you know, six years later, are still working at that company. And I, you know, I was really happy to identify the right people. And so that was something I like, you know, notice like, oh, I can find the right people to fit these roles that people with longevity, with loyalty, that want to be here, want to be part of it. Um, and so I loved all those things. So when I moved over to Dynatrace, you know, I was in an individual, individual contributor role and I knew that there were management opportunities on the horizon, but I didn't know when. But I got in, I loved it, got to do all these things I, I was good at doing. And then the the management role opened up and I knew that that's where I felt really good. Right? I felt comfortable helping people. So, you know, that's I just like coaching people I like I like giving people guidance. And that thing I learned so many years ago that experience matters. Right? Okay. Well, how can I use my experience to help people? Well, maybe I'll become a manager and manage people, just like guiding them with the right experience so that they can also be great at their jobs. Um, and it's just like a natural fit for me.

Sue

Thank you. Lauren, this was fabulous. I love your story. I love your advice. Uh, you know, tremendous conversation. I've learned things. Um, you know, I only have lists. Maybe I need to get more lists to make sure everything is done. I'm a big list person, and I love, you know, I love doing that. But, um, you know, you know, great advice. Um, so thank you so much for your time and, uh, really appreciate it.

Lauren

Thank you Sue.

Sue

Thanks, everyone, for listening. Next month, we'll have another great guest, so keep on listening to Real Talks.