Corona Life, Adelaide Style: the devil whisperer

Here's another quick story from my times back on the 'phones.

Team Leaders are often the engine keeping our centres running.  A great contact centre Team Leader can motivate and inspire people to achieve excellent results; a bad Team Leader can lead to a life-long negative impression of leaders. All Team Leaders have an influence over the performance of your centre. 

Being back on the phones is a great opportunity to observe Team Leaders and they have provided me many of my key lessons over the last three months.   One example happened about a week or so into my tenure as a new contact centre rep. 

Being new, I had plenty of questions. One day, I got up to ask a question of a Team Leader and got push back about ‘social distancing’ and was told to use online chat if I needed to ask a question, which I did. But it appeared to me I was being singled out. The social distancing policies didn’t stop regular huddles at the desk with another Team Leader.   And it also didn’t stop some of my team mates, who kept getting up to asking questions and none of them got told to sit down. Never, ever. 

The most interesting aspect of this story was how quickly my behaviour changed when I noticed the ‘push back’ seemed to be directed only at me. 

Over the coming days, I became drawn into whispered conversations with my team mates about how inadequate the person was as a leader, without even realising (at first) I was doing it: Oh look…the other Team Leader is at the desk AGAIN and so…I get told to go back to the desk and find the answer yet ‘those people’ ask questions all day long (followed by my best death stare!)

It reminded me a little of the famous ‘brown eyes, blue eyes’ experiment that Jane Elliott did in the USA; how quickly I was drawn into a certain mindset in response to my situation. My perception of that leader had become very negative, based on the situation I found myself in. For sure my motivation dropped at the point I was ‘pushed away’ yet could see others getting help, especially given the others asked a hell of a lot more questions than me. I know on one day I became withdrawn.

It’s also interesting how the ‘whispering about a Team Leader’ is a behaviour that as a manager I have seen as the work of the devil designed to undermine us as managers. We are the leaders, the keeper of all that is good in our centre, and no whispering will be tolerated from ye of little leadership knowledge! Yet I easily fell into the habit in this situation despite years of leadership experience. A product of my environment perhaps?

But funniest of all is that I bet that leader has no idea how they influenced my behaviour.

This has been a great remainder on how little it takes to destroy trust in a leader, and as a leader, how you can quickly change the behaviour of others through even the smallest of actions.  As the saying/song goes ‘from little things, big things grow’. 

Could you use some support to help support stronger leadership in your centre? Coaching or mentoring Team Leaders or Managers? I am available immediately for permanent or contract opportunities, on site or remote.