Showing That We Care

Leading by example — especially during a pandemic — builds stronger bonds with customers and employees and changes the world for good.

By Callie Field, Executive Vice President & Chief Customer Experience Officer at T-Mobile

“People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

There’s a lot of truth packed into that single statement! And I have Tanisha Simmons to thank for laying it on me.

Tanisha is a 12-year T-Mobile veteran who works as a Team of Experts Coach in our Charleston, South Carolina, Customer Experience Center. She and three other leaders from my team, Misty Kohoutek-Hay,?David Monroe and?Jana Shead, all spoke about their self-care practices during one of our recent Amped leadership calls. During that call and in further conversations, Tanisha opened up about her COVID-19 vaccine journey.

In short, it goes like this: Early on, Tanisha had decided against getting vaccinated. In her experience, whenever she got a flu shot, she ended up getting the flu. To her, avoiding the COVID vaccine meant avoiding COVID.

But a health scare in her family led her grandmother to a different take. As Tanisha told the Amped audience, “She said, ‘If you wanna see me on this side (that meant while she’s living), you need to get the vaccine!’”

So, with visiting her grandmother in mind and considering her team’s transition back to working at their Customer Experience Center, Tanisha got the vaccine. And she’s glad she did. Now she can visit her grandma and help ensure her team’s safety and well-being. She took action, and now they all know that she cares.?

Tanisha told this story not just to her 42 TEX teammates but to a couple thousand employees on that Amped call. I get goosebumps just thinking about it! I say thank you to Tanisha for sharing her willingness to learn, to change her mind, to be bold and transparent. And thank you to Tanisha’s grandma for being such a strong woman and inciting the change. Both are cases of true leadership.

In fact, Tanisha’s story illustrates the kind of personal initiative that folks at T-Mobile call “leadership from every chair.” It’s peer or horizontal leadership rather than top down, and you see it in the way Un-carrier employees guide and support one another every day. You see it in our selflessness, our integrity, our reliability.

You see it especially in our genuine love for helping each other and our customers, which when put into action is downright infectious. (Seriously — visit any of our Customer Experience Centers or retail stores, and you’ll see this morale-boosting behavior in action). Ultimately, it’s leading by example.

Today I’m calling out Tanisha’s bold spirit and servant leadership. She reflects what we stand for as a company. One that goes beyond serving our customers to help elevate and improve their communities and our entire industry.

We do that by taking action — action that leads to amazing results. I’m talking about committing serious resources to massive civic initiatives that align with our business objectives, like our Project 10Million, as well as the nationwide 5G network we’re building that already covers more Americans with 5G than any other telecom.

And while these efforts improve the lives of millions of people across the U.S., they’re also symbolic. They show the world what’s possible when a major corporation aligns its priorities with the public good.

The same goes for the nature of our communications to employees and customers. T-Mobile has been as transparent as possible about our response to COVID-19, sharing messaging about our store and office closures, remote-work efforts, and health and safety standards. The ongoing pandemic has sent us on a long and difficult journey that we continue to refine, and I’m proud to work for a company that’s as nimble, innovative and compassionate as this one.

Transparency was also the impulse behind our first-ever Corporate Responsibility Report. As the second-largest telecommunications company in America, it’s our responsibility to create an equitable workplace, improve the communities we serve and mitigate the environmental costs of our industry.

And in my opinion, it starts with self-appointed “stewards of the business” like Tanisha Simmons who are making T-Mobile a safe and wonderful place where employees can make a meaningful difference.

Though the primary goal of TEX coaching jobs like Tanisha’s is to drive employee performance, she’ll tell you that her role entails so much more. Whether she’s detailing the company’s LiveMagenta financial and mental health resources for her team or surprising them with chicken biscuits for breakfast, she consistently puts herself out there for her people. She is clear about the professional development she’s gained through all the positions she’s had at T-Mobile, along with what she’s learned and how she’s grown as a person. She is generous with her humanity and empathy, and her team responds in kind, bringing the best of themselves to their work in customer care.

They know that she cares, and so they care what she knows.

It’s not just about her decision to get the vaccine. It’s about being willing to listen to people’s needs, then growing and adapting to meet them. That’s how her team wins from her leadership. And that’s how T-Mobile wins as a company — one open-minded, big-hearted employee at a time.