Myers-Briggs, DiSC^®, Insights, HBDI.  All of these programs (and others like them) introduce the concept of individual personality styles & assist learners to not only understand their own personality style, but also those of the people around them.  The outcome of these programs?  The ability to understand how your own personality interacts with other personality types.

This skill, being able to recognize and “flex” to other personality types, can have tremendously positive results in service organizations including boosts to employee engagement & customer experience, improved coaching interactions, and financial benefits, too, like reduced callbacks and better selling success.     

I’ve worked with hundreds of companies in workshops around the world to train trainers on these techniques, and the enthusiasm for this approach to service is universally positive.  Companies rarely have difficulty justifying the implementation of personality-based service and the rollout of the training is not only engaging and exciting, it’s a heckuva lot of fun, too!  But getting this personalized service approach to stick has been a challenge for some.

So how do you make this behavior stick? 

Read More »

My favorite American football team, the Washington Redskins, is preparing to kick-off the 2010 season with a new coach, Mike Shanahan.  Mr. Shanahan was hired earlier this year to replace Jim Zorn, who was fired last year after coaching for only two seasons.  Mr. Zorn’s successful career as a player (he was a quarterback in the National Football League and threw for over 20,000 yards during his career), however, was not a very good predictor of his success as a coach: in two seasons as head coach the Redskins were an abysmal 12-20, including an embarrassing 4-12 last year.

How could a former player, someone who seemingly knows the game so well, fail miserably as a coach?  Well, like brokerage statements say: Past performance is not an indication of future success. Read More »

Last week a manager at a member company told me, “We’re having trouble making consistent decisions about terminating staff.  How do you know when you’re overinvesting in one person, to the detriment of the rest of the staff, and you should just let someone go?”

The first thought that struck me?  Gardening.

I have a bit of a green thumb … not a “should’ve been a horticulturist” green thumb, but it’s pretty good.

And this time of year is prime season to decide “grow it, or get rid of it” with my plantings.  Some are thriving, others are obviously goners, and some reside in between.  These plantings may do well with some nurturing, or may be too much trouble, and I need to decide quickly, lest they cripple their soil-mates.

Now, this particular manager finds himself in a similar situation with his staff.  Managers need to invest energy into diagnosing and addressing staff members’ behaviors in order to improve performance, and while it’s certainly important to dedicate time and energy to coaching and upskilling, it’s important to know how much is too much. Read More »

I just returned from a vacation at the beach, and even though I had grand plans for my days away from the office (reading a good book, catching a summer action movie with my wife) I found myself doing something that I wish I did more: observing my 5- & 3-year old children.

Too often I find myself involved in activities with my children where I’m just too close to the action, but this past week I was able to just sit back and watch.  And there were some terrific learnings.  For instance, my 5-year old is fearless and she’s a leader.  She has no problem walking up to children and opening the conversation with a zippy statement, like: “I’m 5 years old & I’ve lost 2 teeth.  How many have you lost?”

Also, I learned that my 3-year old is a bit more reserved, but she has an innate sense of humor with a penchant for one-liners & comedic timing that would make the cast of Second City envious.  Like when she told her 13-year old cousin to “Lock it up” because he wouldn’t stop talking.

And I learned these little insights from just sitting back and watching … not interjecting every 2 minutes like I normally do! 

Read More »

When I talk to members about frontline rep coaching programs, they often want a set of proven rules and concrete, granular steps every supervisor should take to be a successful coach.  It’s akin to the instructions on the back of an instant cake mix box.  Just add an egg and some water – and voila! – you have a delicious cake every time.

While I’d love to tell you I can give you the five easy steps to coaching success, I’ve come to believe that coaching isn’t a science we can replicated identically among our supervisors. 

In fact, it’s more of an art form.  And in art, we can give folks the tools – brushes, colors, and canvas – to create a great piece of art, but we can’t tell them exactly what to do.  We can’t tell them how to hold their brush or precisely how to create the most eye-catching color.  Sure, we can give suggestions, but it’s up to the artist to figure out what works best.

So – just like in art we can give supervisors the tools they need to coach effectively, but we can’t mandate a set of discrete actions to success.  And, like Pablo Picasso’s innate artistic ability, some supervisors are naturals and coach effectively from almost day one. 

Many though, don’t have the innate skills required to coach effectively right out of the gate.  But, if there’s no five step recipe for success here, short of the time and resource consuming task of hiring a set of super-coaches, what can we do to help these supervisors approximate the behaviors of their highest performing peers?   Read More »

At CCC we recently completed our annual performance reviews, and it’s gotten me thinking about talent.  More specifically, our high-potential talent and how to keep them around.  Sure, some folks tell me career options are limited in the service world – and there’s ‘healthy’ attrition of individuals who aren’t good fits.  But our top frontline staff, the ones who can just get it done – don’t we want to do everything in our power to keep them?

And the news from one of our sister programs, the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), isn’t good.  In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, their study of over 20,000 ‘emerging star’ employees found some startling facts:

• 1 in 3 high-potential employees are disengaged from their job – and are far less productive as a result
• 1 in 4 intends to leave their current company within the next year
• 1 in 5 see a misalignment between what the company wants and their own personal aspirations

Sound scary?  Well, it definitely got my attention.  And it got me thinking about what we can do to swing these statistics back in our favor. Read More »

I recently worked with a member to determine optimal service organizational structures and staff counts.  I began my research with our new benchmarking data for 2009, attempting to find relationships between center staff size and various productivity and quality metrics.

The most concerning relationship I found was a strong correlation between larger staff size and a higher average number of contacts to resolve issues.

While this was a quick-hit analysis, and not an intensive deep-dive, I believe it highlights one of the most difficult challenges larger centers face: decreased individual ownership of issues, leading to unnecessary repeat contacts.

While we don’t have a comprehensive model to understand why this relationship exists, my hypothesis is that larger operations, foster a “just a number” mentality among staff.  The outcome: reps believe if they don’t give 100% one day (but still passably handle calls, meet QA requirements, etc.) they’re doing their job, especially as it pertains to the thousands of customers who have issues.

I know you’re asking, “Brad, are you suggesting we get smaller?”  Let’s be realistic here – that’s not going to happen. But, I do think you should be asking, “How do I make my center feel smaller?” Read More »

While creating CCC’s recent Train-the-Trainer seminar for improving supervisor coaching skills, we developed a number of role play exercises to help illustrate just what world-class coaching looks like.  We had exercises that taught things like active listening skills and tailoring coaching to personality/learning styles, to name just a couple.  And I have to say, coming up with the role play scenarios and instructions was challenging!  Not only is it hard to come up with realistic examples, but it is tricky to make sure that role plays are both:

• effectively illustrating the intended lesson
• easily understood

At times, I felt like Goldilocks—exercises were just too hard (for example, “Is that situation describing Personality A or Personality B?  Seems like it could be either – or both.”) or too easy (you know, coaching 101 stuff).).  In the end, I think we delivered some useful exercises for companies to use in their own training sessions with supervisors.  Read More »

Stop for a minute and ask yourself this – is “getting coached” a good thing in your organization? If you’re being honest, chances are it’s probably not.

Last week Pete and I spent an entire day running our latest workshop, teaching trainers to instill better coaching practices in their supervisor and team lead populations. We had 30 companies represented across nearly every major industry. It was a great crowd, with very energetic discussion.

The very first exercise of the day involved creating a goal for coaching. And while many participants jumped in an added their thoughts, two things were abundantly clear:

 1) Coaching is a misused word and concept. The outcomes, methods, and intent of coaching around the room couldn’t have been more diverse. Naturally, we assume when everyone nods their head in agreement at the word “coaching,” it’s universally understood. Well, you know what they say about assuming…

 2) Most organizations have not defined a true goal and purpose for coaching. We’re telling our leaders to “coach” without a sense of what that really means. Good coaching does not involve performance management, nor does it involve a conference room.

Read More »

As a diehard men’s U.S. college basketball fan, the four-week period between “Selection Sunday” until a U.S. national champion is crowned, commonly referred to as March Madness, is one of the most intense and exciting months of the year.

Sixty-five teams will tip-off in mid-March, all vying for the crown of “Best College Basketball Team in the Country”.  And while all of the teams have talented athletes, and have achieved successful seasons to reach this stage, it’s their coaches that often deserve the most credit. 

Coaches recognize the strengths and opportunity areas of every player, and help guide each player individually to improvements that will ultimately boost the overall performance of the team.  You don’t find coaches telling players to simply “score more points”; they actually help them understand how to score more points.  And the best coaches emphasize “in-game coaching”, taking a few seconds during the game to guide the player to better performance, without taking him fully out of the game environment.

And while coaching in the contact center occurs almost as frequently as coaching on the court, not enough “in-game coaching” is happening in most contact centers today. Read More »