This is Podcast#1 featuring special guest Anand Rego, Head of Contact Centres at Open Universities Australia.
Anand talks about how this journey has transformed his leadership style, how his teams have created an environment of continuous improvement, shared accountability and a daily focus on their Purpose.
We get into the detail around how he has practically applied agile ways of working and my highlight, how they used shared KPI's to tackle a problem in the system of work leading to poor student outcomes.
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Show notes
- Setting the scene for what lead to contact centre needing to reinvent itself (1:24)
- The realisation that the way they were working wouldn't get them to were they needed to be and the first time they heard about a new way of working (6:24)
- Anand talks about the structure of the team, their contact channels and the decision to move away from individual KPI's (10:50)
- The importance of vision, purpose and values to connect people to the organisation and helping them make the right decision for the customer (16:56)
- How people can find a way to game the system if the system is not aligned to the purpose (17:52)
- How his life experience and previous roles shaped his approach to leadership and leap of faith to become a servant leader (23:25)
- What Anand has done to support and sustain his change in style. Including visualisation of the work, stand-ups, sprint planning and the power of the Retro (27:06)
- Arnie jumps in explain the Retro for this playing along at home and Anand gives an example of how Team Leaders use Retro's to get in the moment feedback from their teams (36:24)
- We get into the way to set up self-organising teams around the customer use the right metrics and visualisation (46:38)
- Using the agile principles and mindset to deliver a telephony upgrade in record time - 8 weeks from start to finish (48:22)
- The benefits the team are seeing in staff turnover and engagement and the changes they made to salaries and KPI's to create shared accountability by putting the customer outcomes before those of individuals (1:03:50)
- Anand talks about "6x multiple" to consider when setting targets for people that features in a book called Primed to Perform and the link to Cobra farms (1:06:24)
- How shared sales KPI's are getting better outcomes for students than ever before and even happier people (1:08:47)
- Anand finishes with a great example of how he has developed the agility in his leadership to seek out opportunities to have his own assumptions tested (1:15:12)
Links to books and articles from the show
Article: Why should anyone be led by you?
Book: Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation by Neel Doshi & Lindsay McGregor