The Conscience of a Leader: How to Stay True to Yourself and STILL Achieve Exceptional Results

Nuraini has been appointed as the Manager of a Customer Care Centre of a large multi-national company for the past 3 months. One of Nuraini's first tasks is to improve the efficiency of the Customer Care Centre.

    The main reason that the company is now focusing on improving efficiency is that many customers are making requests and demands that are in direct violation of the company's policies and procedures. There is also requirement from the company's management for the Customer Care Centre to share part of the sales team's workload in servicing existing customers, so that the sales team can spend more time selling.

     Hence, Nuraini's key performance objectives will be to ensure that her team handle requests wiyhin the first phone calls as much as possible. Even when customers are upset during the call, her team will have to "educate" customers about the company's policies, and make customers be compliant. As the same time, the Customer Care Centre will have to be self-reliant when giving answers and advice to customers, as any calls to reach out to other departments (such as Sales) will be deem as inefficient handling of customers' issues.

     After some weeks of following the company's directives, Nuraini started to realise that her initial gut feel, while contradicting with what the company wants, might be right after all. In her years of experience working as a customer service professional, Nuraini instinctively knows that no one can reason with upset customers. When her team tried to "educate" upset customers on the company's policies and procedures, the customers got even more upset and sometimes went off to escalate their complains with senior managers in Nuraini's company. As her team has been told not to "bother" sales people when handling customers' requests, a lot of such requests were actually rejected downright, causing even more customers to complain to the sales people who serviced them. Ironically, instead of relieving the sales team off their workload, sales people will now have to handle their customers' complains with Customer Care Centre.

    Not surprisingly, Nuraini is facing serious stress and pressures from all corners. Being the leader of her team, Nuraini gets complaints from the sales team that her Customer Care Centre is creating more customer complains than actually being trying to help. Her Customer Care team members are also now demoralised with the increasingly number of upset customers they face, and are frustrated by the inability of their leader to help them deal with such issues. Most importantly, Nuraini's senior management is not happy with the Customer Care Centre at all, since the efficiency of her department has not improved at all.

    At this moment, Nuraini is faced with a few choices. She could quit her job, and then bring some of her best people over to the competition. She could also force her management's decisions down to her team, and fire anyone who does not comply. She could request for a transfer. Or she can act on her conscience and seek ways to achieve better results and satisfaction for all.

The Different Leaders We See

     When it comes to leadership development, many people view it as developing senior leaders at the top levels. However, as shown in the above story, leadership development is needed at all levels to really boost performance and achieve better results at all levels in an organisation.

    Based on some observations of how leaders behave, here are some ways that we can categorise leaders by their personal values:

1. The top-down Elitist Leader: the one who drive down instructions from the top, and makes sure his team executes those orders quickly and perfectly.;
2. The power-grabbing Opportunistic Leader: the one who looks into how they can optimise their personal gains, be that better career prospects, greater power or other personal gains;
3. The populist Antagonistic Leader: the one who is almost always at loggerheads with senior management, choosing to affiliate with team members regardless at all times;
4. The authentic Conscientious Leader: the one who is able to unify common goals of different groups of people by balancing the diverse needs of different groups, while staying true to her principles and values.

     In most cases, most companies tend to make top-down decisions, and hence prefer to hire top-down Elitist Leaders so that such decisions, instructions and orders are being implemented effectively. The teams under these Elitist Leaders usually receive a lot of support from top management, often getting a lot of resources and having their status in the organisation raised. However, Elitist Leaders usually don't listen to the ground, and when things don't go as planned, Elitist Leaders tend to blame their team members for "incompetent execution of instructions" more so than reviewing if there are flaws in the planning. After some time, Elitist Leaders will find their staff disengaged and getting poorer results in spite of their best efforts in getting things done. In a fast-changing and highly-demanding world, Elitist Leaders are finding their teams a lot more difficult to manage.

    The power-grabbing Opportunistic Leader is sometimes mistaken as the Elitist Leader as the former usually would want to impress top management so that he could gain better career advancement in the organisation. However, the Opportunistic Leader has other traits that Elitist Leaders don't. The Opportunistic Leader can sometimes seek eliminate threats to his position, whether by stifling promising high-potential team members or by making decisions that favour the organisation retaining his employment. The Opportunistic Leader likes to play politics to maximise his power and influence in the organisation, and upon leaving the organisation, likes to take along his team to his new employer. 

     The populist Antagonistic Leader is one who is very much into building morale of the team, so much so that he neglects the needs of top management, as well as business realities. Decisions are usually made based on whether team members will like them, and management initiatives that are not popular with team members are either blocked or put on hold. Although being able to engage his team to exceptional performances, the Antagonistic Leader is sometimes being fired for not complying to company's policies or cultures, despite delivering great results.

     The authentic Conscientious Leader seeks to identify common goals of different groups and balance the diverse needs of those groups as well. She works on the basis that exceptional performances can only be sustained if everyone in the organisation buys-in and supports her plans. She seeks not just to lead her team, but also influence others to her cause. Unlike the Opportunistic Leader, the Conscientious Leader's purpose is to achieve better results for the greater good. The Conscientious Leader has her principles, and if the organisation's goals are irreconcilably contradicting to her principles, she will choose to leave quietly. After all, there will be other organisations who will appreciate the Conscientious Leader's personal values, and even if it's not intentional, the Conscientious Leader leaves a lasting legacy.

The Way of the Conscientious Leader

     In the earlier story, Nuraini is stuck in a position where she faces pressure from her management, her colleagues from other departments and her team. In most cases, other leaders in her position would have chosen to leave, or simply implement management's decisions with greater rigour.

     Nuraini decides to do things a little differently. She has a deep conviction that her role is to make her Customer Care Centre the bridge between the customer with the other departments of her company. She would like her team members to be actively listen to customers' needs and provide alternative solutions to their problems. In return, her team members will be much appreciated by customers for being willing to help, and her company will be able to use less time and resources to improve customer satisfaction. In addition, she intends to share her team's customers' insights with her sales colleagues, so that they could better suggest new products and services to get their customers buy more from them.

    Rather than blindly obeying orders and following her performance measurement guidelines, Nuraini asks her team to:

• Make the soothing the frustrations and anxieties of customers as the top priority, even when that will mean making follow-up calls that will reduce efficiency;
• Provide alternatives and options to customers, rather than to give a down-right rejection, when customers make requests that are contradictory to the company's policies and procedures; and
• Engage the sales team to make important decisions about customers, since upset customers may channel their frustrations on sales people, while satisfied ones may want to increase their purchases

    Nuraini fully understands that her management will frown at her new ways of doing things. However, she has the courage to implement those changes, because based on her experience, she knows that in a matter of weeks, her team will help her company achieve:

• Better efficiency by having shorter calls, since customers are being pacified quickly and be able to listen to reason.
• Drastically better customer relations since customers now can get different alternatives and options to explore, while being fully supportive of the company's policies and procedures
• Improved sales effectiveness since the sales team deem the Customer Care Centre as being actively involved to retain existing customers, and then making them buy more.

     Nuraini knows that there is a possible risk that her management may not give her the chance to prove her ideas are right. However, she has faith that her management, just like the customers she handles, can be pacified and be influenced to seek alternatives that will help them achieve their goals in more effective ways.

How You Too can be True to Yourself, and Still Deliver Results

    A friend used to tell me that while she definitely does not agree with some of her company policies, she has chosen to remain silent, rather than to raise issues to her management. Even when she had found a new job elsewhere, she feared repercussions even when her views might indeed help her company achieve better performances.

    If you work for a management with a history of psychotic behaviour (that fired anyone with any hint of differing opinions), then it's best to keep your job for the time being. However, while senior management may not take direct criticisms positively, they usually will appreciate if you can take gentle steps to make things better.

     Unfortunately, since most people are too afraid to act for all the wrong reasons, they don't become leaders. They are mere order takers.

    To rise to increasingly tough challenges, organisations (be they companies, government bodies or even entire nations) need leaders who are willing to take actions. To create long term exceptional results, we need leaders who act with conscience.

c.j. Ng

c.j. is a certified scrum master, a certified coach and works with management and sales teams to get better results through people. c.j. can be reached at his LinkedIn page here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cydj001/