Part 1: Effective Contact Center Leadership Strategies with Kim Scott

By Replicant
September 12, 2024

Effective leadership is more crucial than ever, particularly in the high-pressure contact center environments that exist today. To explore how leaders can navigate these challenges, we sat down with Kim Scott, author of the best-selling book Radical Candor and a respected voice in leadership and management.

We’re thrilled to announce that Kim will be sharing her insights as a keynote speaker at Resolve 2024, where she’ll dive even deeper into the principles of open communication and effective leadership.

In this exclusive Q&A, Kim discusses how contact center leaders can foster a culture of candid feedback, drive innovation, and balance empathy with accountability. Whether you’re managing a team of five or a department of hundreds, Kim’s advice is sure to resonate and provide actionable strategies for leading with candor and care.

Q: Contact centers are known for being high-stress environments. How can leaders apply the principles of Radical Candor without overwhelming their teams or contributing to burnout?

A: The absolute fastest way to improve efficiency in contact centers, and to improve relationships with employees is to SOLICIT feedback from everyone, and to encourage them to share their best ideas with you and with each other. Here is a story about how that worked at Google, where I managed a customer support team:

At Google, people constantly came to me with good ideas— more than I could handle, in fact— and it became overwhelming. So I organized an “ideas team” to consider them. For context, I circulated an article from Harvard Business Review (HBR) that explained how a culture that captures thousands of “small” innovations can create benefits for customers that are impossible for competitors to imitate. One big idea is pretty easy to copy, but thousands of tweaks are impossible to see from the outside, let alone imitate.

Next, I talked through some key principles that ought to guide the ideas team, first among them empowerment. The ideas team had to commit to listening to any idea that anyone brought to them, to explain clearly why they rejected the ideas they rejected, and to help people implement ideas that the ideas team deemed worthwhile. If somebody’s idea seemed especially promising, they could even negotiate with the person’s manager to give them some time off from their “day job” to work on implementing it. They were encouraged to assign me up to three action items a week.

After this, instead of feeling stressed whenever I would hear a cool idea in a meeting or receive an inspired email, I could react enthusiastically and delegate it to the ideas team. Soon, lots of people were submitting ideas they had for improving the product, growing the business, and making our processes more efficient. We created an ideas tool (basically just a wiki) that allowed people to submit an idea, have it reviewed by the team, and voted up or down. That was a form of listening, and people whose ideas got voted up definitely felt heard by their colleagues. People whose ideas were not voted up knew that their ideas had been explicitly rejected: a much clearer signal than radio silence from over burdened management. However, a vote is not always the best way to identify the best ideas, or to make sure people are listening to each other. Therefore, I asked the ideas team to read all the ideas and talk to all the people who submitted them—to listen. After that development, the team used a combination of votes and judgment to select the best ideas.

More important, the ideas team helped people get the selected ideas implemented. Occasionally this was about getting time for people to work on them, or getting some input from me, but often all it took was just the validation and encouragement that came from listening and responding. “Yes, that’s a cool idea! Do it!”

Sarah Teng, a recent college graduate on the AdSense team, came up with the idea of using programmable keyboards to create shortcuts for phrases or paragraphs they used over and over when communicating with customers. It seemed like a good idea, so the ideas team asked me to approve the budget to buy programmable keypads. I did as they asked, and this simple idea increased the global team’s efficiency by 133 percent. This meant that everyone on the team had to spend far less time typing the same damn words over and over and had more time to come up with other good ideas— a virtuous cycle. Bam!

When Sarah presented her project to the team, I didn’t just thank her; I also showed a graph of how this idea would improve our efficiency over time. But efficiency is not what people cared most about, so I also stressed to the team how her innovation would make people’s jobs more fun and help them grow in their careers, since they’d get to spend less time doing grunt work and more time doing work they found interesting. I explained that Sarah would have an opportunity to share her idea with leaders from another, much larger team, for an even larger impact. And I sent around again the HBR article showing how competitive advantage tends to come not from one great idea but the combination of hundreds of smaller ones.

Why did I add all that context? First, to demonstrate just how great the impact of her idea was. The use of programmable keypads by itself was hardly revolutionary, but when people saw the cumulative effect of that idea and others like it over time, Sarah’s innovation felt a lot bigger. Second, it inspired people who had other ideas like this to be vocal about them. Third, and most importantly, it encouraged people to listen to each other’s ideas, to take them seriously, and to help one another implement them without waiting for management’s blessing. It’s so easy to lose “small” ideas in big organizations, and if you do you kill incremental innovation.

Hundreds of really smart people had been working in Online Sales and Operations for years. It was hard for me to believe that nobody else had ever had the programmable keypad idea before, but if they had, management hadn’t listened. If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fi x things you as the boss never even knew were broken. Most meaningful to me was that morale on the team soared. At one point the “Googlegeist” survey on employee morale showed that the team of people who were answering customer support emails for AdSense felt much better about the role that innovation played in their work than the engineers working on Search did— despite the fact that those engineers were probably some of the most creative engineers in the world.

Q: With the rise of remote and hybrid work models, how can contact center leaders effectively build and maintain a culture of open, honest feedback across distributed teams?

A: Whether you’re remote or in person, it’s really important to pay attention to the Radical Candor Order of Operations:

Step 1: Solicit feedback. Don’t dish it out before you prove you can take it.
Step 2: Give both praise and criticism, and more praise than criticism.
Step 3: Gauge how what you are saying is landing. Most of the time it will go well. But sometimes the person may seem sad or mad. That is your cue to show more Care Personally. Other times the person may brush you off. That is your cue to challenge even more directly.

Whether you are remote or in person, the best time to solicit feedback is at the end of every 1:1 meeting. And the best time to give it is in impromptu 2 minute conversations.

Your 1:1 meetings will differ a bit if you’re remote. I recommend more frequent, shorter 1:1 check-ins if you’re not physically in the same place. The reason is that it’s easy to get disconnected. You want to make sure you don’t let too long to by without a conversation.

Your 2 minute impromptu conversations will be a bit different remotely as well. You can’t just take a walk. I recommend using the phone. There is a lot of evidence that there’s more noise than signal in facial expressions and body language over video. But you want to have a real, synchronous conversation so that you can gauge how what you’re saying is landing. That means not sending a text or an email. Pick up the phone and call!

Q: What strategies can leaders use to balance empathy and directness when having tough conversations with underperforming employees, especially in high-turnover environments like contact centers?

A: Clear is kind! You are not being “nice” not to tell a person when they are making a mistake. Not telling them deprives them of the opportunity to fix the problem. Being Radically Candid means:

Being more specific and sincere with praise.

Being more kind and clear with criticism.

This will improve your relationships at work AND help you achieve a better business result. But it’s easy for us to give this advice and hard for you to do it.

Here’s a way to think about how to be more kind and clear with criticism and more specific and sincere with praise. Radical Candor is HIP:

Humble
Helpful
Immediate
In person
Private criticism / Public praise
Not about Personality

Let’s double click on “not about personality.” Make sure both your praise and your criticism is CORE: Context (Cite the specific situation). Observation (Describe what was said or done.) Result (What is the most meaningful consequence to you and to them?) Explore next steps (Work with the person to help them explore the next steps?)

Finally, be prepared for emotional reactions. If an employee becomes upset, respond with compassion and understanding. Acknowledge their feelings and provide support, but don’t retreat from the challenge. Instead, reinforce your care personally by showing empathy while maintaining your directness.

Click here to read Part 2 of our interview with Kim Scott.