Quick Summary: The customer success fire drills that drain time and burn out teams typically stem from gaps in manager awareness, skills, and experience. The solution: coaching that sticks.
Every customer success leader expects to deal with escalations, sudden churn red flags, and internal emergencies. It’s part of the role. But if you’re in fire-drill mode for multiple days or weeks at a time, you have a problem—and it’s unlikely to be a product, process, or workload issue, says Megan Robinson.
“If you are always living in “fire” mode, something has to change,” says the leadership coach and founder of E Leader Experience. “It is not a sustainable model for you. It’s not a sustainable model for your team.”
The most common cause of permanent fire-drill mode? It’s the way your managers and team leaders are leading your CSMs, she says.
At ZERO-IN 2025, Megan led a wildly popular workshop for senior CS leaders on how to coach direct reports to step up and manage fire drills while they’re still in the spark and smoke stage. Here’s what we learned, complete with three coaching strategies for building more confident managers within your team.
The cost of living in customer success fire drill mode.
Megan framed fire drills simply: moments where something gets stuck and can’t move forward. A small issue becomes a big one because it wasn’t addressed early. You might recognize them in:
- Churn notices that feel “too late to save”.
- Enterprise escalations that jump straight to executives.
- Feature and product frustrations that have been simmering for months.
- Tech issues and education gaps that were visible long before they exploded.
- Minor issues, escalated all the way up, that never should have reached leadership.
Individually, these tend to look like one-offs, but they add up to serious cost, not to mention up to 50% of senior leaders’ time being spent fighting fires.
Time drain: Senior leaders spend more than half their time firefighting instead of working on strategic initiatives and growth.
Weaker decisions: Underprepared managers become more likely to make fast, untested calls with little analysis, creating more work and more fires.
Performance drag: Underperformance lingers because managers don’t give clear feedback, don’t set expectations, or don’t follow through.
People strain: poor management is a primary driver of burnout and attrition. As Megan shared, a huge percentage of employees leave jobs to get away from a manager, not the company itself.
Why do customer success fire drills happen?
“Most of what causes these fires is not a product,” Megan explained. “It is not your process. It’s the people managing it.”
To illustrate, she challenged the workshop’s participants to think about their most recent “fire.” Most could be traced back to the same three root causes, or gaps, in a manager’s professional toolkit.
1: Awareness gaps. The manager doesn’t see the early warning signs, isn’t fully listening in customer conversations, or lacks self-awareness about how their own behavior contributed to the problem.
2: Skills gaps. The manager doesn’t have the conflict, collaboration, negotiation, or stakeholder management skills to navigate tricky situations. They struggle to manage up or push back when a fire drill from above isn’t actually the top priority.
3: Experience gaps. The manager hasn’t handled this scenario before and doesn’t know how to respond. Alternatively, they have been through it, but no one helped them reflect on it and they didn’t learn from the experience.
Related: Do customer success teams have an operational leadership gap?
But why do they keep happening?
Most organizations invest in manager development, Megan points out. The problem is that those investments are typically unstructured and incomplete.
Mentorship programs are often launched with high hopes, then left unsupported. Mentors aren’t trained to coach, while mentees don’t know what “good” looks like. The relationship turns into occasional advice-giving or status updates instead of real development.
Training libraries and course catalogs are easy to provide, but adoption is low and application is lower. Managers can take courses while multitasking, then go straight back to their old habits.
Shadowing is haphazard: managers might sit in on meetings, reviews, and calls, but without benefiting from a structured debrief. It’s easy to hope they’ll “pick it up” without checking their understanding of what they just saw.
What’s missing, Megan says is real coaching.
Coaching turns experiences, content, and mentorship into real behavior change. It adds critical thinking versus advice-giving, promotes accountability rather than box-checking, and encourages reflection and application.
Three coaching strategies for turning managers into leaders.
Strategy 1: Use your one-on-ones as coaching sessions, not status updates
If one-on-ones with your managers take the form of project reviews, pipeline checks, and decisions for you to make, you’re training those managers to bring every fire (every spark, in fact) to you.
“The more advice that you give,” says Megan, “the more firefighting you’ll have to do.” Instead, you should:
Have the manager own the agenda. They should come in ready to talk about what’s working, what’s stuck, and where they want support.
Listen more than you talk. The goal is to hear how they’re thinking, not just what they’re doing.
Ask questions instead of giving answers. Megan had attendees workshop this item by brainstorming practical one-on-one questions. Our favorite suggestions included:
• What’s working well right now? What’s not?
• What’s keeping you up at night this week?
• What blockers are you facing—and what have you tried so far?
• What’s one account, project, or customer you’re struggling to engage?
• What would you do next if I weren’t available?
The last question is powerful when someone brings you a problem. In most cases, they already know what to do, but don’t have the confidence in their own judgement to do it without you.
Strategy 2: Build accountability into learning so that it sticks.
If you’ve invested in a training library, playbooks, or external workshops, you’re on the right track, but achieving lasting change isn’t that simple.
“The forgetting curve is real,” says Megan. “People forget over 70% of what they learned within two weeks.”
To move from “we have content” to “we build capability,” you need to build follow-up via accountability loops. Megan shared several simple ways to do this without adding complexity:
In one-on-ones: Discuss what you learned from that course / workshop / session? What are you going to do differently because of it? How did it go when you tried that?
In team meetings: Have everyone share one takeaway from a conference or training. Ask each person to name one change they’ll test with customers or stakeholders in the next two weeks.
Tie learning to goals: Include specific skills in quarterly goals. For example: “handle three complex renewals without escalation,” or “run monthly cross-functional account reviews”. Use your performance and growth conversations to revisit those goals, not just “did you complete the training.”
Strategy 3: Add two reflection questions to every learning moment.
“We don’t learn from experience,” said Megan. “We learn from reflecting deeply on experiences.”
Our final practical takeaway is also the simplest. To turn everyday experiences into development, as these two questions whenever a fire happens—or whenever your manager shadows a tough call, renewal, or escalation.
1: “What happened?” Have them walk through the situation from their perspective. Then, ask follow-ups: Who else was impacted? What were the early signals? Where did it start?
2: “What did you learn?” Let them define the lesson, not you. Notice whether they’re drawing the conclusions you want. If not, coach with more questions.
Without this step, people don’t automatically learn from experience. They learn from reflection on experience. Otherwise, they may walk away with the wrong lesson entirely—like “stay quiet in tough meetings and you’ll be safe,” instead of “next time, I’ll prepare three options and bring them early.”
These two questions take minutes, but over time they build managers who can see smoke earlier, name root causes more clearly, and carry forward better patterns into the next situation.
Ready to get started and break the cycle.
Our final takeaway: you don’t need a huge new program to start moving beyond fire drills. With a coaching-first approach, you can start with small moves that equip managers with more awareness, skills, and the right experiences.
Sure, you’ll still see sparks, but you’ll spend far less time running into burning buildings, and much more building the kind of team that can spot and solve problems before they catch.
