Leadership 101 in the Expivia Interaction Center

Hi everyone.  I wanted to give some quick thoughts on how I believe leadership needs to be taught in the contact center environment.  We take middle management training very seriously.  I hope you can see that in this post.

-Tom Laird
CEO Expivia Interaction Marketing

I have found that leadership skill training of middle management in the contact center environment is lacking at best and non-existent at worst.  Too many contact centers just promote reps that did a good job when a supervisor/team lead leaves.  You can’t hand the keys to a new car until you know that person is ready to drive yet it seems to be the way many centers operate.  Great contact centers must train middle management in many different aspects of the contact center world. 

So many supervisors think that they are given authority and don’t understand that authority is EARNED.  Authority is earned through TRUST.  How does your supervision gain trust?

Trust = Competence + Character.

I take responsibility personally to help our supervisors down this road of trust and ultimately of authority.  This starts by whom we select.  It is our job to train the competence into our supervision. 

Character is a little more difficult.  I believe we can change and mold the character of our supervision to a certain extent.  We are though very careful in whom we select.

If we do have supervisors that have been through our full management training program and we believe have the trust of their reps and of us, now they have to manage.

I believe to have supervisors reach the full potential they must manage three key areas:

1)     Manage themselves

2)     Manage peers- ( Meaning do they understand how to handle relationships with those they do not have authority over)

3)     Manage their team

Do they have the trust of everyone they work with?   If not then it is our job to polish and make them stars.  Making someone competent, although not easy, is much easier than trying to polish up the character of a person (although it can be done!!) so choosing whom we put in these positions is very important.

MANAGE PEERS:

This gets overlooked so much but we must watch and train the proper way for supervisors to handle those that they do not have “authority” over.  How do they handle business relationships with peers, those above them and with those in other departments?  Do they handle these with respect and understand the positive example they are setting for their reps or are they handling these improperly which will actually make it much harder for them to manage their team. 

This is not talked about very much and is such an important part of managing in the contact center world where your reps are with you all the time.  Trust me they see everything their supervisor does good and bad.  They can’t fake these relationships.

MANAGE THEIR TEAM:

The last part of leadership on the call center deals with the actual interactions with their team members.  This is a very interesting dynamic.  Remember,   authority can never be given, it must be earned.  Great reps will not listen to a supervisor just because they said so.  There must be a mutual TRUST that is earned over time.  We must help our supervisor to be ready to take on this role before they go to manage people.  That’s why I hate blind promotions of reps to supervisory roles without going through training.

I will show how I break these down further in training in a future post.

THIS IS EXPIVIA

 

-Tom