Nancy Lublin wrote a thought­ful col­umn in the April issue of Fast Com­pany, called Let's Hear It for the Lit­tle Guys. In it, she posits that we've over­done the whole lead­er­ship thing and "we're not spend­ing nearly enough time cred­it­ing the folks who turn all that vision­ary stuff into tan­gi­ble reality …"

No foolin! Try play­ing Under­cover Boss for a day and work along­side the "lit­tle guys." Answer the phones in the call cen­ter, work the teller line. At the end of the day, I'm sure you'll have a new­found appre­ci­a­tion for what your staffers go through in their daily imple­men­ta­tion of the company's mission.

While you're at it, look and lis­ten care­fully. Do your employ­ees have the nec­es­sary tools and skills to do the job you expect them to do? Do they feel proud of their work? Are they get­ting enough recog­ni­tion from their super­vi­sors? Do they sat­isfy cus­tomers and bring in rev­enue? Or, are they like most bank tellers I've run across when I've closed accounts. They cheer­fully close the account, smile, and say, "Is there any­thing else I can help you with?" Then they thank me for stop­ping in. Am I sat­is­fied? Sure. Has the bank missed out on rev­enue by not train­ing their tellers to find out why I'm leav­ing, over­come my issues, and cross-sell some addi­tional accounts? Only one teller has ever done that. I went in to close my account and due to her supe­rior skills, I now have five accounts with that bank.

If you're work­ing the phones, do you see your employ­ees exhausted and demor­al­ized at the end of the day because of their con­stant work­load? Are they depressed from han­dling angry callers all day long? Pro­vid­ing good cus­tomer ser­vice skills train­ing is essen­tial to over­come these and other issues. And as one Under­cover Boss found out, if the work­flow isn't work­ing, huge amounts of com­pany resources are taken up with call escalations

Yes, of course, it's impor­tant to pro­vide lead­er­ship train­ing, man­age­ment train­ing, and recog­ni­tion at the top for a job well done. Some­one has to set strat­egy and direc­tion for the com­pany or depart­ment. But don't for­get the lit­tle guys! They're the ones who make it all happen.

Peggy Car­law is the founder of Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems, a lead­ing train­ing com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions between front-line employ­ees and cus­tomers. Peggy is co-author of sev­eral books pub­lished by McGraw-Hill, includ­ing Man­ag­ing and Moti­vat­ing Con­tact Cen­ter Employ­ees and The Big Book of Sales Train­ing Games.

Peggy Carlaw

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