Developing a Self-Managed, High-Performance Culture
In Your Contact Center
Performance Based Cultures
Measurement and metrics have been used to closely monitor the performance in contact centers.
Like the factory floors of the past we can identify standards and the minutia of deviations of individual performance. The question is: are we building high performing organizations that can excel at customer service and revenue generation?
If you have any stake at all in the success of your contact center, then you, like all of the hundreds of organizations we have worked with over the past 30 years, are concerned with developing a performance based culture in your business. So let’s start by taking a look at what we mean by “performance”.
The Performance Equation
We should think of performance as a function of the three elements as shown in the diagram below.
TALENT X HABITS X OPPORTUNITY
Inherent Trainable Attitude Effort Career Work
(Potential) (Thoughts) (Behavior) Job Environment
“Talent” has two distinct components.
Inherent talent, which tends to remain constant, includes such things as I.Q., personality, and common sense. Trainable talent is learned and includes such things as knowledge and skills.
Together they could be referred to as the “can do” aspect of performance.
The “Habits” component of the equation, a person’s attitude and effort, make up the all-important “will do” aspect.
The “Opportunity” element refers to a person’s fit to the job and to the environment, including fit to the person’s manager, (the indirect manager, in self-management terminology). Where all three elements are present in good measure, you’ll have high performance.
Accountable for Results: Responsible for Performance
Here is where the Performance Equation gets real interesting. Although Performance is not the same thing as Results – there is a strong correlation in that, good performance will tend to deliver good results. But whereas results are uncontrollable, trainable talent and habits are controllable. A basic condition of performance cultures is the focus on controllables. So when we ask people in our seminars and workshops, “who has responsibility for an employee’s talent”, the answer invariably is that that responsibility is “shared” between the company, the manager and the employee. Our seminar participants also readily confirm that the Opportunity component of performance is also a “shared” responsibility. However, when we ask about responsibility for the employee’s “will do”, there ensues lively discussion and debate. How you respond to the question is a likely indicator of the approach you normally take in dealing with an employee’s “will do”, their attitude and effort.
The position the leaders and managers take on this question may actually be the major determinant in developing a performance based culture. The answer is simple, but the stakes are high. And the answer to the question?
The responsibility for managing one’s attitude and effort belongs 100% to the individual!
Because the “will do” component of performance is so critical to overall performance, (managers are almost unanimous in feeling that it is the major factor in an employee’s failure or success), it creates a very real challenge for leaders and managers who are used to trying to make people work through exhausting coaxing, or external motivating strategies. Yet in a true performance culture employees are not only allowed but expected to manager their own attitudes and efforts, to motivate themselves, to take responsibility – in other words, to self-manage. In these self-managing cultures, the indirect managers are the coaches and consultants focusing on knowledge and skill development, planning and strategizing and creating effective business processes. While it may seem like a high risk allowing agents in contact centers to self manage is not really all that difficult. Self management doesn’t imply that your agents will create their own policies and procedures or that they will not adhere to your CRM strategies, but rather that they will commit to achieving results and apply their efforts to succeed. Within your guidelines exists the possibility of individual self management to common goals.
Self-Management
Our research has told us that the key to creating a performance based culture, is to understand, that all of us are self-managers, but not all of us are consistently and systematically self-managing. Performance based cultures are always “self-managed” cultures – in other words they are built on the belief and the understanding that “self-management is the number one competency of successful people.” And in self-managing cultures, making and keeping commitments to the critical success factors of the job is a given. If you boiled it down to a process, self-management in a performance culture would look like this:
- Employees determine their own goals, objectives (in line with corporate objectives)
- Figure out their game plan or action steps;
- Make the commitment to the plan and action steps;
- Keep the commitment;
- Self-reinforce on the kept commitment;
- Evaluate their performance and results;
- Seek resources for improvement
Bringing Self-Management to the Business
The key concepts discussed here translate into real-life business practice, in part, in the following ways:
- candidates for employment are screened and selected on the basis of their self-management potential, just as much as they are hired for their experience, skill and knowledge
- from the first day of employment, expectations are clear that people are required to be self-managers and are respected and coached as such.
- training on self-management occurs early in the career, which not only provides the education and the understanding, but strengthens the expectations
- the concepts and principles of self-management form the basis behind all corporate processes and routines, such as weekly and monthly reviews, performance appraisals and individual employee work standards and critical success factors
- all employees are provided with regular training as well as growth and development opportunities
- self-development is emphasized and mentorship is encouraged
- people are held accountable for results but responsible for performance
- managers manage by Effort rather than by Results only
- Commitments are made and kept (not only external commitments, those made to others, but self-commitments, the commitments people make to themselves)
Utilizing the power of “self-commitment” and the expectation that all of your people can be self-managers is the real driver of performance based cultures and one that any business organization can learn and adopt. These concepts and practices can be integrated into your contact centers and can greatly improve results in areas of customer satisfaction and revenue generation.
John C. Marshall Ph.D.
Chairman
Self Management Group
416 746-0444 ext: 232
jmarshall@self-management.com