Build Your Culture for Your High Achievers Or You Will Lose Them
Why Maintaining The Workplace Cultural Status Quo Hurts Your High Achievers More Than It Helps Those Lagging Behind.
When I was 22 years old, I was about to start my first real job. I had worked a few part-time gigs before, some in hospitality, some in retail, but I decided to pursue my first full-time position. I applied to work at a large bank. 1,200 applicants handed in resumes for the position, but the bank was only offering eight of them the job.
I Got The Gig
After a few rounds of interviews, I was one of the eight people who was extended a job offer by the bank.
Naturally, I felt pretty good about myself. I was one of eight applicants out of 1,200 to be offered the job. Although I was excited, I knew that the bank would be expecting excellence. So I promised myself that I would work harder and better than I ever had before.
I Started Taking Calls
My job was to handle a portion of the bank’s phone calls. And there were a lot of phone calls into the bank. I worked in the customer care department with 500 other bank employees, who all worked on the same floor in a call center.
Every day, I answered around 70 calls from complaining customers. I took notes on their concerns and entered them into the system. I quickly learned that people who called the bank were rarely in an agreeable mood. Although I had to speak to rude people all day, I was determined to do the job well.
Matt vs. The Metrics
I realized that my job performance was measured based on three different metrics.
The number of calls I took per day. The expectation was that each bank representative would take 70 to 80 calls per day.
The amount of time spent on each call. I learned that the more time spent on each call was actually better, at least according to my peers.
The amount of dead time between my calls. This was called “handling time.” Bank representatives were told to keep the amount of time between the previous call and the next call below 30 seconds.
All 500 people working on the call floor were scared of these three metrics. The metrics would light up green on employees’ computer screens if they were meeting or exceeding expectations. The metrics would light up red if they were not. If I hit the red zone of one of the metrics, a manager would walk over to my desk and watch me with a disapproving stare until my metrics rose back up to the green.
The culture at the bank didn’t provide support for flailing laggards, nor did it incentivize excellence among the high achievers. The culture asked its workers to stay above the red light and no more. But I had an idea.
My LightBulb Moment
I thought to myself, “I'm going to gamify this.” I realized that I could pump my numbers in all three metrics, and I wanted to prove that I could outsmart the success measurement system at the bank. After all, I did promise myself that I would do my best to be excellent every day at that job.
I figured out that if I took all of my notes while on a call, instead of after I hung up, I could end one call and start the next with nearly zero average handling time. The average handling time on the floor was about thirty seconds. With this adjustment, mine became two seconds.
I quickly went from an average of 70 calls per day to an average of 100 calls per day. I had green lights across the board and quickly became the highest achieving call center employee of the 500 on the floor.
Matt vs. Nigel
It was time for a promotion, I thought. I expected that I would be offered one when my manager, “Nigel,” pulled me aside one day. Instead, Nigel said to me, “I have been getting complaints from the rest of the team about you. You need to slow down. You need to work slower.” My team members had complained to Nigel that I was working too fast. The real reason they were frustrated was that I was blowing their numbers out of the water.
I had worked so hard to break all these call records; I had the record for most calls per day and fastest average handling time per day, and yet my manager asked me to slow down because I was making team members look bad. My coworkers had been at the call center for 10, 15, and even 20 years. Some of these people had chosen this as their lifelong career, and they were getting shown up by this young cocky upstart: me.
A Boss Named Nigel
I felt completely disenfranchised by my first real boss, my “Nigel,” at the age of 22.
I had stepped into my first real role ready for excellence to be the expectation, not the exception. When I figured out how to be excellent at my job, my manager immediately shot me down and communicated to me that excellence was not part of the culture at the bank. Excellence would be punished, not praised.
The Value of Leadr
Today, I am the CEO of Leadr, a people management software designed to help organizations develop leaders at every level of their organization. Leadr was made for people like Nigel who decided that the “good enough” culture of the bank was more important to uphold than a culture which celebrates hard work and high achievement.
If Nigel was a part of Leadr culture, I never would have been discouraged from working harder than my coworkers.
Here's the reality. We can’t underestimate the impact we have as leaders. Nigel, who shot me down all those years ago, had a profoundly negative impact on helping me further develop my gifts and skills in the years that came after that conversation. “Good enough” seemed good enough to me all of a sudden. At that time, I needed someone who would not just celebrate my work, but push me to be even better than a two-second handling time average. Who knows where I would be today if I had that person ten years ago tell me something different than “slow down?”
That's why we do what we do here at Leadr. That's my Nigel story. And we all have a Nigel story. Nigel is why Leadr exists. Nigel is the reason we do what we do, because we believe that if Nigel had Leadr, he never would have put someone like me in the position I was in, discouraged to succeed.
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Leadr can help you and your team establish a better culture so that your high achievers are praised, not punished, and your laggards are encouraged to surpass every expectation. Book a demo with Leadr today.