Strong leadership creates an engaging culture in award winning contact centre

I had the privilege recently of visiting the state-of-the-art contact centre that Cabot Financial (Europe) recently constructed in Kings Hill, Kent.  There was something different about it compared to the call centre palaces I had visited.  I soon realised that it was the management and leadership at a senior level.

"An inspirational leader is somebody who focuses more on their personal power to win the hearts and minds of the workforce, rather than relying on their positional power," remarked Dan Archer, a senior researcher at the Leadership Trust.

John McCluskey, HR Director at Cabot, embodies that sentiment.  And together with the senior management team has turned the business into the leader in consumer debt purchase in the UK.  They have done it by giving their employees the one thing that a job normally takes away - control over their destiny. 

Cabot has broken the "sweatshop" image of call centres by giving their people clear boundaries to work within, but they don't necessarily dictate how people are going to go about their business. Instead, they make it absolutely clear where they want to be, what the outcomes are and what the vision is, but then trust people to get on with it.  By encouraging their employees to do more than just a competent job, they are getting significantly extra performance out of the individual. And collectively that has had a positive affect on the bottom line. 

McCluskey intuitively understands that HR has got to influence managers in terms of realising that there is a business case for employee engagement and the managers then have to enact that.  He believes that HR also has to scrutinise the recruitment, selection and promotion criteria, rewards, and appraisal processes, to make sure that everything the organisation does is done in a way which is consistent with the values of the business.

As the Director of a retention and talent management consultancy, I know that HR has a key role to play in contributing to leadership development and continuous cultural improvement. It is wonderful to once in while find someone like John McCluskey who is effectively working with senior management to develop an engaging culture at all levels within the organisation.

Visit www.recrion.co.uk to find out how you can gauge whether your people management policies are having a positive impact on the bottom line.