Not long ago, I was having a rather involved debate with a leadership team in a call center. We were discussing the merits of allowing the customer retention team to be able to set up voicemails to better assist customers on a more personal level. At the time, the conversation was actually quite maddening…and most of that frustration came from the degree of oversight that the leadership team wanted to have over the voicemail etiquette for the team members.

This level of oversight and control is what I call the “foreground management” model (aka “top-down leadership”). 

In previous posts, I described the idea of “background management”...where the expectation of your employees is that they are professional adults competent and capable of completing the job they were hired to do. What’s demonstrated above would be an example of the quintessential opposite. Foreground management is generally based on the assumption that the employees are incompetent, and that incompetence needs to be mitigated.

There are places where having a foreground management style is appropriate. Anywhere that a specific procedure must be followed to the letter or loss of life/livelihood can occur (heavy manufacturing/industry is a fantastic example of this) is one of them. If you’re in a situation where failure to follow that procedure would lead to serious consequences (i.e. loss of life/equipment/etc.), foreground management is the way to go. Not because you’re working with incompetent employees, mind you! But because the consequences of a mistake are so dire. If you can come up with more than a handful of examples for this, please let me know!

In most businesses, the foreground management style is a stifling environment at best…a morale killing one at worst.

Foreground or Background?

Take the example of my conversation. As we were discussing the best way to go about implementing the ability to use voicemails for their retention team, it was made clear that the management (in their own words) “wanted ‘allllllll’ the oversight”. What their concerns boiled down to was that other departments utilizing voicemails (whom these procedures were being based on) did not have specific requirements for returning calls…nor did the managers have any sort of live-monitoring capability on the voicemail itself. This scenario seems terrifying for leadership teams that are used to the foreground management styles. On the one hand, I could see where they were coming from…you want to have a way of making sure that people are doing their jobs right?

WOAH! Wait a minute!

If you are in the position of needing to make sure people are doing their jobs, why did you hire them in the first place? Obviously, you didn’t hire people based on the assumption that they’re incompetent…nor did you fail to hire working professionals! Now (as a disclaimer) this blog is in no way meant to encourage a laissez faire work environment where employees simply do as they please! There should always be some form of check in/quality assurance/oversight - simply for the sake of making sure your business is running the way you want it to. The trick is to know when the oversight is enough, and when it is too much.

Extraneous Oversight and Accountability

In the case of that call center, departments already using voicemails were set up in such a way that if they weren’t answering the voicemails in a timely manner, it would have an immediate and blatantly obvious effect on customer satisfaction. Specifically, they wouldn’t make the sale! Therefore, any additional oversight was irrelevant. The question that was ultimately posed to the retention department's leadership became “why does a department focused on re-selling need more oversight than a department focused on selling? The numbers achieved by departments utilizing voicemail demonstrate that extraneous oversight to this process is unnecessary.”

Trusted Professionals

A big part of Background Leadership is knowing when to trust the adults you’ve hired to do the right thing. When you set the adult expectations, and address your people as the professionals you want them to be, then they have no reason to fail…except for what you might call an innate desire to not be employed at your company anymore (more on the so-called “quiet quitting” to come in future posts). In a #kingdomclass environment, all leadership needs to do is set the expectation and be there to guide and redirect when it’s not met. That’s the difference between background and foreground leadership. Neither is bad or good, but there’s a time and a place for each. 

Do you know with absolute certainty what type your business uses? Do you want to know how to become a better guide? Reach out today! We’d be happy to help and be that objective third party for you!