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How to make your first line managers first rateThe 6 Skills Contact Center Team Leaders Need to Succeed in a Hybrid Work Environment & How to Develop Them

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The employees most critical to your contact center’s performance

Strategic Contact’s annual survey of contact centers’ top challenges and priorities labelled 2020 as “the year of the agent.” Lori Bocklund, the report’s author, suggests, “As centers tackle their challenges and pursue their priorities, I believe we will see a strong focus on the agent experience, and the result should be a better customer experience, as well.” That’s not surprising. More than 60% of survey respondents see improving the customer experience as this year’s most important goal. However, just 15% saw improving the agent experience as a top objective this year. And that’s strange. Because these contact center executives identified attrition as their biggest challenge, by far. All of this is all the more perplexing given the emergence of the hybrid work environment, where agents work in a center, at home or someplace else in this time of COVID-19 Industry experts indicate attrition in contact centers, whether company-owned or operated by business services partners, tends to be driven by three factors:

→ The nature of the work → A bad fit for the job → A direct manager lacking in critical skills

Since the employee experience drives the customer experience, not having capable managers makes improving both nearly impossible. The ones who can make the greatest impact – with the biggest role in managing and driving performance of agents – are the team leaders. They are literally your company’s first line of management. And, the employees most critical to your contact center’s performance. It’s logical, then, to do all you can to ensure these first line managers are first rate. And that’s what this eBook is intended to help you do. Understand the skills that team leaders must have and how best to develop them. Afterall, since you always look to them to grow and develop their teams, you should do the same for them – for their sake, their teams, and your organization.

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The 6 skills required for the longest job description in a contact center

Team leaders hold a position that is both highly randomized and very broad. They are responsible for:

→ A service-oriented, professional work environment

→ Supervising the performance of a team of 10 to 20 agents

→ Taking the necessary actions to improve those employees’ productivity

Along with that, they need to have a knowledge of all reporting mechanisms, communications terminology and technology as well as organizational procedures. But wait, there’s more:

→ Conduct quality monitoring

→ Manage schedule adherence

→ Meet, if not exceed, customer and company expectations

→ Be a resource to answer agents’ questions when they’re dealing with customers from wherever they’re working

→ Handle angry customers when they ask to speak with a supervisor

That just begins to cover what constitutes the duties of a team leader. Which is why it’s often referred to as the longest job description in a contact center.

SKILL

01 Leadership SKILL

02 Teacher/Coach SKILL

03 Strategic Thinker SKILL

04 Negotiator SKILL

05 Communicator SKILL

06 Goal-setter

So, what are the skills a first line manager needs to be first rate? In examining the traits of people in this role at contact centers around the globe who truly excel in this “jack of all trades” existence, Centrical has identified six skills as most important for a team leader to be successful. They are:

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Leadership 01 How to develop the skill

Turning team leaders into actual leaders requires them to learn certain skills and understand their responsibilities. Without either, they cannot successfully help their team accomplish what they’re expected to do. Too many team leaders attempt to manage their team through friendship versus leadership. If that seems basic, you’re right. But you need to recognize that for most team leaders it’s their first managerial position. Often they’re in the team leader role because they were strong individual performers and didn’t have leadership experience or training to draw on. And that’s where you come in. Team leaders, like any group of young or new managers, need mentors. People, like you, who have the seasoning and capability to help and guide them to become true leaders of their teams and your organization. If your organization is using an engagement performance management platform to engage, train, and assess the productivity for your agents, it can be also used to help instill the needed focus, knowledge, and performance of your team leaders. Personalized microlearning, offered in the flow of work, can augment whatever instructor-led training or mentoring programs you’re employing to enhance team leaders’ leadership qualities.

The skill

Martin Shinagel, a retired dean at Harvard University, noted “there are more than 15,000 books on leadership in print. Articles on leadership number in the thousands each year.” And he made that observation seven years ago. So, the count is undoubtedly higher. Even with a seemingly endless collection of thoughts on the art and science of leadership, it’s really all about someone getting people to work together harmoniously. A capable leader is very important to providing the right environment such that it positively influences the team’s ability to accomplish its goals. Of course, ineffective leadership can result in the team feeling discouraged, disengaged, defeated, and unsuccessful. Which is why those team leaders leave the company.

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02 Teacher/Coach

The skill

Team leaders need to be able to grasp the dynamics of their teams regardless of where they’re working. To do that they must teach and steer the group through the typical stages of team development. That is “forming, storming, norming, performing, and transforming.” Psychologist Bruce Tuckman first came up with the memorable phrase in his 1965 article, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.” He used it to describe the path that most teams follow on their way to high performance. To be an effective teacher, a team leader must make team members aware of the natural obstacles to team performance and, then, help them to move from one stage of team development to the next. This is especially key in a work-from-anywhere world. Coaching involves developing team members’ performance, offering feedback, and demonstrating the desired skills and expected work principles. A good coach works alongside the team to develop their skills, often working one-on-one with individuals. Whether instructing or refining, it’s their responsibility to identify team members’ strengths and weaknesses. They then need to determine which ones excel at which tasks and which ones need extra help, learning, and development. Beyond that, the capable teacher/coach should be able to determine areas of opportunity for individuals and the team, and the appropriate steps to improve on them. While an act of teaching has a beginning and end, coaching is an ongoing process that is done while keeping overall operations moving toward the shared goals.

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How to develop the skill

There are shelves full of books by successful athletic coaches, each offering a championship-caliber blueprint for a superbly performing team. Two things to keep in mind.

→ Unless it’s during a break, the job of a contact center team member does not involve playing basketball or some other sport

→ Most of those books, and others like them, fail to help team leaders be better teachers/coaches

Again, it needs to be underscored, most team leaders aren’t inherently exceptional teachers. Nor are few, if any, born great coaches. But you can get them to be. The punchline to the old joke about how do you get to Carnegie Hall is apropos – practice, practice, practice. You need to give team leaders opportunity to practice their teaching skills on you or others who can evaluate and coach the coach, as it were. About coaching, you can conduct mock coaching sessions to show and train team leaders how to deal with an assortment of situations, including calming a crying child while speaking with a call from an upset customer An employee performance management platform also affords you the opportunity to present challenges to team leaders that can serve to hone their teaching/coaching skills. The platform also lets you present simulations that are either teachable moments or coaching opportunities.

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03 The skill

Team leaders need to be able to see the big picture and, in turn, understanding how their teams contribute to the company’s goals and strategy overall. Most deficient in this skill tend to focus on what’s directly ahead. Team leaders must have peripheral vision to recognize what’s going on around them. Ideally, they should be able to see around corners; meaning anticipate what’s going to – or needs to – happen next. Greg Githens, author of “How to Think Strategically,” observed the three characteristics of people who think strategically are:

→ Curiosity – They ask questions

→ Ambition – They’re they willing to drive to overcome the status quo

→ Pragmatism – They like innovation but only if it works

Strategic Thinker

How to develop the skill This might be the most complex skill of the six. Because of that, it’s useful to develop it at a team leader’s onboarding, whether done in-person or remotely. You should then utilize an employee performance management platform to reinforce that initial learning activity. Strategic thinking is as much an attitude as a skill. A way of seeing the team leader’s job in a broader context. To form and nurture that attitude, do the following:

→ Urge team leaders to use both sides of their brains; the analytical and the creative

→ Promote thinking frameworks that include objectives, an action plan, and metrics

→ Have them look at things from different perspectives to get a fuller view of their aims and the company’s

→ Let them be assertive to feel empowered to put forward fresh ideas

→ Encourage them to be flexible, open to different approaches and feedback

→ Prescribe patience because there are bumps on the road to progress

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04 Negotiator

The skill

There are several primers on Colin Powell’s principles to leading teams. One, “The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell,” includes a Powell quote that fits here: “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” The words of a world-class negotiator. Perhaps not on the level of Powell, but team leaders do need to be excellent negotiators. They take responsibility for their teams and must negotiate with you and other members of senior leadership to ensure their units have the needed resources to accomplish the goals they’ve been assigned. Along with that, there’s a near-continuous negotiation as it regards supervisors’ requests and, not to be overlooked, negotiating with customers. Since teams are made up of different personalities, work traits, and motivations, conflict will occur. It’s the team leaders’ job to prevent conflict, where possible. In the face of conflict, a team leader needs to resolve it in ways that, as Powell suggests “..offer a solution everybody can understand.” And embrace.

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How to develop the skill

Becoming a better negotiator is an ongoing process. Team leaders will handle a range of situations, with a range of people who are, conceivably, experiencing a range of emotions. Each negotiation is unique. Still, team leaders will get better by using these essential techniques of a proficient negotiator:

→ Prepare, then prepare more – Even spur-of-the-moment negotiations requires team leaders to size things up

→ Leave your ego behind – The aim is not to impress the other party but to have them feel good about the resolution

→ Listen carefully – Hear the other side to truly understand them

→ Ask or don’t expect to get – Make your need known and understood

→ Anticipate compromise – However strident the other side might be, they may come around to your point of view

→ Stick to your principles – Negotiations should not put you in a position to compromise your values

→ Offer and expect commitment – It’s what allows a negotiated agreement to work

→ Get confirmation – Once agreement is reached, make sure all involved understands what happened and will happen

These techniques can become part of team leaders’ behaviors through game-based learning done on a continuous basis as well as with a real-time performance management capability that lets the team leaders see their progress, be advised as to what their next best action is, and more using an employee performance management platform.

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05 Communicator

The skill

At times team leaders need to communicate in a tactful, diplomatic way. Other times they must be very direct. In addition, they must be able to communicate up and down. To supervisors. And to their teams. This need to adapt to the situation is crucial to ensure team leaders’ communications are effective. But no more than the need to be clear. Along with that, team leaders must convey (and receive) messages in ways that are taken as constructive by the team as well as individual team members. No matter how well thought through, feedback – even praise – done poorly can be taken badly by the recipient. Done poorly with frequency, team leaders will lose their teams. The importance of this cannot be understated. Feedback provided appropriately will help to resolve conflict, bring resolution to problems, and help to build trust among team members and respect among superiors and peers.

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Along with microlearning, professional coaching, and lots of opportunities to build confidence speaking to people about something that affects their paycheck, here are a few tips worth sharing with your team leaders:

→ Listen – It’s 50% of communicating. When team leaders really listen, they’re more able to answer questions

→ Know your audience – How team leaders interact with you or other members of the

senior leadership needs to be different than how they are with peers or subordinates

→ Minimize – The objective of communicating is to share information. Not to overwhelm or confuse. Be succinct

→ Don’t assume – Make certain the other person understands what you’re sharing with them

→ Body language – Team leaders need to show they’re “open.” Don’t cross arms. Look people in the eye. This is really important on video calls to WFH agents.

How to develop the skill

Like developing negotiating skills, improving team leaders’ skills as communicators takes time and practice. It’s useful for you to:

→ Audit situations where team leaders are communicating with their teams

→ Share with team leaders what you felt worked, what didn’t

→ Plan with them ways to improve

→ Bring team leaders together for a series of role-playing exercises

→ Let them learn from each other

→ Encourage peer-to-peer feedback for its impactful and ability to build comradery In addition, an employee performance management platform can be used to present communications simulations so individual team leaders can sharpen their skills. At the same time, the platform lets you see their progress to make your one-on-ones even more productive.

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Goal-setter 06 How to develop the skill

For your team leaders to be goal-setters, you must first have them learn about and develop proficiency using the tools and systems your organization employs to set, track, and analyze performance. This calls for a blending of instructor-led training and in-the-flow-of-work microlearning, personalized to the skill levels and aptitude of each team leader. You can use gamification to challenge their abilities to use your measurement methodologies and, in the process, learn where their knowledge gaps are to provide additional training or support.

Along with learning how to drive your organization’s goal-setting machine, as it were, you need to help your team leaders appreciate that the goal-setting process isn’t drudgery but a way to help them do their jobs better, if not more easily. By extension, using a measurement process they’ll be able to manage their teams more efficiently. To help make goal-setting a part of your team leaders’ skill set as well as to have their teams buy-in, and perform accordingly, consider making the goals public, perhaps on leaderboards. Display how an outstanding measured performance by an individual can impact the big picture. And, to get everyone’s participation and boost your team-leaders’ confidence in their goal-setting abilities, tie the goals to either tangible or intangible incentives. All of this can be done with a platform able to adapt to the variables of a hybrid work environment.

The skill

Peter Drucker, the fabled management consultant, is often quoted as saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” He meant that you can’t know whether you’re successful unless success is defined and tracked. By the way, Drucker also believed that managers should, above all else, be leaders. Setting goals, deciding how they’ll be measured and then track a team’s progress to reach them, prevents misunderstandings, misdirection, and, obviously, missing the objectives. Goal-setting also gives team members a clear understanding of what they’re expected to complete, to achieve. Clear team goals and monitoring progress, ideally in real-time, helps members work more collaboratively, no matter where they’re located. More importantly, setting goals for individuals drives their performance to the next level. The key point here is someone with six weeks experience shouldn’t be assigned the same goals as someone with 6 years. A team leader who grasps that shows signs of being a skilled goal-setter.

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Conclusion

Hopefully, after reading this eBook, you’re ready to develop and implement a program to make your first-line managers first rate. If you’re wondering when…the answer is right now. Especially so as the change to the workplace brought by COVID-19 continues. The sooner you help your team leaders become better able to execute your organizational strategy and maximize the performance of their teams, the sooner you will see an overall improvement in the performance of your operation. There’s also an excellent chance that agent attrition will go down, customer satisfaction will go up, and more. All you need to do is arm your team leaders with the right development tools and programs to develop the six skills necessary for their success in today’s hybrid work environment.

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About CentricalCentrical for Contact Centers helps you train agents and team leaders faster, improve their productivity, and enable them to deliver great customer experiences. It does this by blending personalized microlearning and real-time performance management with advanced gamification. Centrical achieves faster time to value though built-in best practices and use cases for contact centers. This results in repeatable, predictable success, and faster-time-to value. Several of the world’s largest contact centers/BPOs work with Centrical to help their agents, team leaders, their organizations, overall, exceed their daily goals. Whether you choose to implement Centrical or another employee performance management platform, we trust this eBook has provided you with a deeper appreciation for NPS and how it can let you more effectively manage your contact center’s operations and its employees to attain the highest possible customer satisfaction.

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