How People Gauge Your Leadership: Mind Over Matter – If You Don’t Mind, We Don’t Matter.

This is my share for today’s #motivationmondays.

How people gauge your leadership style is just mind over matter. What this means to them is that if you don’t mind, we don’t matter.

I think that statement is pretty self explanatory. So I don’t need to expound beyond that.

But let me give you an example. This is a story from my past.

Back when I was a call center agent doing customer service stuff, I had this boss, and she was a very numbers-driven person. I’m a numbers guy too so I could relate to her on that level in terms of getting performance figures up.

I was always the top performer when it comes to Customer Satisfaction, and it was because I studied a lot of best practices and did a lot of research on the topic of providing great Customer Experience, and I experimented and implemented my findings to see what worked best.

I became very well equipped with these skills that provided great customer satisfaction, and I was really willing to share it to the entire customer service department so we can all be better at what we do.

The problem is, this boss of mine didn’t care about me wanting to share my skills with others.

All she cared about was that I was doing well in CSAT which helps the team performance (which is of course her performance as well), and that I need a little bit of work on AHT (Average Handling Time), because I really took a lot of time to establish a connection with the customers and resolve their concerns at first point of contact.

I felt like I wanted to be able to impact a bigger cause, that by sharing what I knew, more colleagues and customers would benefit from it.

But no, she made me feel like I didn’t matter.

So I took it to her boss. Of course, he liked the initiatives I wanted to share, and eventually I got promoted because of it, and I got to become a key player in the Customer Satisfaction team, who teaches the best practices to everyone else, and ensures we are providing the best service to our customers.

But my boss just got angry at me because I bypassed her, though I only did that because I felt like she didn’t listen.

Mind over matter. She didn’t mind, so I felt like I didn’t matter.

I hope this motivates to you become a better leader. Be mindful of your people, remove fear and encourage best practice sharing, and make them feel like what they do matters.