Quick Summary: The secret to success as you lead your customer success team through unfamiliar terrain? It’s trust. Learn the trust-building habits that help your team overcome their resistance to disruptions.
Change is rarely a polite guest for customer success teams in 2026. It doesn’t knock, ask permission, or wait until your team feels ready. Whether it’s an acquisition, a new technology. or a leadership shift, disruption remains constant.
What’s more, the pace of change is accelerating. AI agents are reshaping how CSMs work. Automated health signals are replacing manual account triage. Customer data is flowing across product, support, and revenue teams in real time.
As a CS leader, this means you’re doing more than managing relationships. You’re expected to orchestrate adoption at scale, operationalize AI-driven insights, and prove measurable revenue impact.
The role of the CSM is evolving too. Teams are balancing human connection with AI-powered,autonomous workflows. Playbooks that once relied on intuition are becoming data-driven. Eery new tool, process, or strategy introduces another layer of change for teams and customers to navigate.
What this means is that change management is no longer a soft skill. It’s now a core operating capability.
How to lead your CS team through change.
“Change happens and the way we handle it makes all the difference,” says Julie Schmidt, an EdTech customer success leader at Everway, who led a workshop on building a trust-driven foundation for change management at the most recent ZERO-IN.
In her session (wonderfully titled “Shift happens”), Julie broke down the fundamentals of leading a customer success team through change into three core areas: biology, psychology, and daily trust-building practices.
1. Learn to manage the biological barrier to change.
First, a quick biology lesson. To manage change effectively, we need to understand why our brains hate it so much. When disruption lands, your brain doesn’t applaud your creativity and strategic foresight. Evolutionarily, our brains crave routine, because the status quo is energy-efficient and safe. Forging new neural pathways in the prefrontal cortex is hard work, and may cause the brain to shift into survival mode.
When change is thrust upon us, the brain’s orbital frontal cortex lights up (the same circuitry processing fear and pain), and our capacity for creativity and problem-solving goes dark. This leads to the corporate version of “Fight, Flight, or Freeze”:
Fight: team members or customers push back, poke holes in plans, and undermine initiatives. Not good.
Flight: teams check out, absenteeism rises, and customers go dark. Not good.
Freeze: productivity stalls as people mentally shut down and stop driving adoption. Not good.
Together, these go a long way to explaining why so many change programs flame out. In fact, 50-70% of corporate change initiatives fail, says Julie.
And the answer isn’t about “picking a better framework” Julie says.
Instead, the key is that frameworks fail when foundations are weak—which means that the rollout of any structure or playbook stands a better chance if you’ve built a team culture that can hear it. .
2. Build a psychological foundation of safety and trust.
What’s the antidote to our brains’ hardwired avoidance? Psychological safety, where people can “brainstorm out loud,” share half-finished ideas, and take risks or challenge the status quo without fear.
Trust is the “brick by brick” foundation of this safety
Trust is built on a simple yet powerful formula, Julie explains: Authenticity + Competency + Empathy. As a leader, you earn trust when people see the real you, have confidence in your judgement, and believe you genuinely care about them.
However, trust can’t be built in one big moment. Building a foundation that can withstand change is more like stacking a deck of cards incrementally, over time (also known as habit-stacking).
3. Develop daily trust-building habits with your team.
To build your foundation of trust, Julie recommends a series of 7 daily practices:
1. Practive vulnerability. Admit when you don’t know: “I don’t have the answer yet. I’ll find out and get back to you.” That admission does double-duty: it humanizes you, and creates a follow-through moment to earn trust.
2. Celebrate questions. Treat tough questions as contributions rather than dissent or a career risk. Try calling out the “best question of the day” at the next team meeting.
3. Connect emotionally. Remember personal details, like a customer’s excitement for an upcoming vacation.
4. Practice genuine curiosity. Listen to understand (and recall – hello, connecting emotionally), not just to “check a box”.
5. Model resilience. Be transparent about project failures and what you can learn.
6. Model compassion. Pair accountability with empathy. Shift from “blame” to “partnership” when a customer misses a milestone.
7. Practice the “Yes And” approach. Borrowed from improv comedy, this mindset turns a half-baked idea into a moment of co-creation.
Above all, avoid the surprise drop.
“We never want big change to arrive as a surprise announcement,” Julie emphasizes. Leaders should start early with small communication “nuggets” so the idea feels familiar by launch day. Always lead with the destination and the why: here’s where we are, where we’re going, why it matters—and how we’ll co-design the path. That’s how to turn compliance into commitment.
The TRUST first framework
When daily habits are set and you start to build that psychological safety net, the payoff becomes practical. People’s amygdalas calm down, their prefrontal cortexes engage, and they feel safe. When your team is comfortable and trusting in their environment, you’ll see them surfacing risks early, spotting better paths, and moving faster with you.
Julie packages up this system of habits and change management philosophy into her own TRUST First framework.
Transparent communication: Socialize changes early. Don’t let a big shift arrive as a surprise announcement. Share the “why” (the destination) to help people move into problem-solving mode.
Relationship banking: Ensure the trust bank is full before you need to make a “withdrawal” during a difficult transition (e.g. daily habits paired with authenticity, competency, and empathy).
Understand individual impact: Recognize that change affects every person differently based on their personality. Proactively pull aside the most “change-averse” members for private conversations to hear their concerns upfront.
Stakeholder co-creation: Involve your team or customers in designing the solution or setting the timeline (no process or communication monoliths).
Track trust: Monitor the health of your relationships – it can’t just be Gantt charts and checklists.
Change isn’t really about the moment the “shift” happens. It’s about every interaction you had leading up to it. Invest in vulnerability, curiosity, and transparency now, so your teams and customers are prepared for whatever the tide of change brings tomorrow.
“Trust is not built during the change,” Julie says. “It’s leveraged from the relationships we’ve already established.”
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