The Hero They Deserve: A Manager’s Guide to Effective Leadership

Every centre has a manager, but few centres have leaders. Optimize your call centre by utilizing the unique skills of both.

What’s the difference between a manager and a leader? While the two seem similar in name, anyone that has worked for a manager who was a poor leader can tell you that the skill sets for each are as different as night and day.

Managers are the bigwigs that implement policies, create structure and enforce procedures that serve to increase productivity and efficiency in the workplace. They excel at creating processes that work towards achieving the goals of their company — but can also be the reason many white-collar workers dread going to work each day.

Leaders, on the other hand, perform a different function, but are no less essential to the workplace environment. A leader is the public speaker that rouses a crowd to thunderous applause. When faced with problems, leaders don’t just tell employees what to do, they work towards building a culture of communication that allows employees to solve problems together. Leaders gain the admiration and respect of their colleagues.

Managing vs. Leading

While the above may make it sound like we’d all be better off scrapping our managers in favour of charismatic leaders, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Think of the manager/leader dichotomy as the two wings of an airplane. Both are essential to the functioning of your centre, and without both your centre is doomed to crash.

Building a Leader

The traits that make a strong leader are very different than those that make a manager:

• Agent Communication: It’s hard to be a leader without a close connection with the people you lead. Your agents are the soldiers in the trenches that field your calls and carry out your directives, and as such are the best ways to receive fast feedback on the state of your operation. This personal touch with your staff is one of the biggest differentiators between managing and leading.
• Inspiration and Motivation: Leaders should be able to inspire their team to excel and reach their full potential. They’ll motivate their employees during times of stress, coach agents to step up their game and be able to recognize when problems occur.
• Building a Positive Environment: There’s no getting around the unfortunate fact that the call centre can be a challenging work environment. Angry customers, call volume spikes and a need for lightning fast response time on top of exceptional interpersonal skills means that finding a few good agents is easier said than done. Strong leaders will be aware of this and do what they can to groom their staff to excel in their positions, all while creating a positive work culture focused on friendly interaction, honesty and communication.

Management Material

Managers, on the other hand, require a different set of skills to succeed in their tasks.

• Updating Operations: A good manager stays on top of which systems work in their centre and which ones drag procedures down. This can mean anything from keeping the contact centre updated with new technology that promises increased productivity to efficient staffing during predicted spikes in call volume. This balance of manpower to meet demand is an essential part of the managerial process.
• Ability to “People Manage” Effectively: While related to the strong interpersonal skills that leaders possess, people managing is more about grooming your staff to meet the challenges that the work environment presents, and often involves the following practices:
  • Structured goal setting to meet objectives
  • Incentivizing employees based on performance
  • Prioritizing creativity and the customer experience

The Winning Combination

A study by Harris Interactive showed that 96 percent of customers will leave a business without making a single complaint. This is a hard pill to swallow for customer service centres that thrive on client feedback. With this metric stacked against them, contact centres need to rely on the ingenuity and creativity of their employees to recognize when problems occur — which is exactly where effective leaders come into play.

An employee who can fill the interpersonal and motivational roles of a leader while handling the administrative goals of a manager can provide extraordinary benefits to agent productivity in any contact centre. The leader sets the stage for the success of their team, and having a captain at the helm who can both motivate staff and stay on the cutting edge of efficiency can mean big benefits to the customer experience.

Interested in learning more about how to provide employee support in both leader and managerial roles? Download our free white paper!