Foundation Builder Needed – No Experience Necessary?

When I entered the call center arena as an Operations Manager I was given the job of improving the coaching and feedback process to improve metrics that our client had set for us.  I had ZERO call center experience and limited managerial chops under my belt.  Archie Bunker would have felt like this if they had taken him out of his cab and placed him in the cockpit of a 767.  I was in over my head.

I had just come from the road as a sales representative for a concrete building materials company.  It was 1998 and our company had just been bought and all of us found ourselves out of work.  I don’t remember how I was even introduced to this OM job.  I tell people I “Kramered” into the spot referring to the Cosmo Kramer character on “Seinfeld” – he’s one of those guys that find opportunities and you just scratch your head wondering how he stumbled into that.  I was a salesman.  I wasn’t planning on staying a manager there for long.  And being charged with something so alien to me as improving metrics on a large scale was going to speed that process exponentially either by my hand or my call center director’s hand. 

My management process was sporadic (and that's probably being too kind).  I had focus groups with agents but they were not really that focused and I would sometimes lose control of the meeting.  The only thing I learned was that they either didn’t like their supervisor, was friends with their supervisor, or they didn’t know their supervisor.  Three different responses with three different solutions and nothing productive for me to use.  

I tried being one of those walking managers who tried to get along with everybody.  This micro management approach only bit me in the rear end because some people felt there was favoritism shown by me.  Worse is that in a call center that size I did miss talking and bonding with some agents.  Even worse was I had agents who read my intentions another way and felt that they could bypass their immediate supervisor and come to me directly.  That gave a whole new definition to open door policy.  What a mess.

I soon realized that management was a lot like sales and I knew how to sell.  I was making mistakes as a manager I never would have made in the sales arena.  The same salesman’s mantra kept creeping back into my brain.  It was a definition of a word we are all familiar with:

Insanity – “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”

At least Tommy had a plan!

I’ve watched a lot of sales reps go down in flames doing this and I was heading down the same path as a manager.  Sometimes all they would do is make “comfort calls” – visits to their 2 or 3 core customers they would take to lunch every week and scratch out the same small orders from them every visit.  Then they would wonder why their sales were stagnant year after year.   There was no plan; no foundation.

I failed miserably at my first stab as a salesman.  It was a summer job with a publishing company selling bible concordances and study guides door to door.  This company put my group in the heart of the Bible belt – Oklahoma.  We would start each morning to eat breakfast together and sing uplifting and inspiring chants before we went to our designated selling areas.  I thought this was a load of crap.  We had two weeks of sales training very specific to what we would be doing but I refused to pay attention.  How hard was it to go from house to house and sell these books?  I didn’t plan my day or my route. 

The realization that I had the same net worth in Oklahoma at the end of the summer than when I left Ohio was sobering.  I was stubborn and thought I knew what was best about an industry I knew nothing about.  What a wake up call!

 

I had no solid foundation.  Oh wait, yes I did; I just chose not to build on that foundation!  The publishing company I sold for had over 40 years of people who grew very prosperous on that foundation.  The one I thought was a load of crap.   

After that summer I vowed never to be that arrogant again.  I certainly had been doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.  In my future sales positions I was determined to blueprint the same strategies that were successful to other salesman.  Now as an Operations Manager I would adopt the same philosophy.  And it worked.

Now my focus groups had purpose.  Now when I walked the floor I had a reason.  Now my meetings had agendas, take aways, and accountability.  Most importantly if I did something and it didn’t work I moved on and didn’t dwell.  I didn’t repeat the same thing over and over expecting different results.  We create our solid foundation and we build on that foundation.

I promise to start sharing some of the coaching and feedback principles in this blog.  Nobody really wants to hear endless stories about my sales career or even Archie Bunker.  What’s important to me is that people see and understand the path that led me to these principles that work.  As managers you are going to have to draw on your own experiences (wherever you got them) to be effective leaders and it’s critical that you infuse your own passion and understanding.

Once you have that solid foundation your passion is what will help you create that great environment I spoke about in my last blog.  And I guarantee there will be nothing toxic about it.