Two types of workers

Are you someone who cares about the outcome, or someone who cares about the task?

In my work we are thrown onto a project and have a whole lot of urgent things to do. There are meetings to book, spreadsheets to start, docs to decipher, workshops to run, people to impress. In the midst of this chaos there are two types of consultants that emerge, those that care about the task and those that care about the outcome.

The task is to build a new system for a call centre. The outcome is to help our client’s customers solve their problems a bit more easily. 90% of consultants will dive straight into the tasks, there are deadlines we need to meet! But some consultants will realise they’re actually customer of our client and will ring the call centre and see how the experience is. Some consultants will go “hey can I go spend an hour with them?”. Some consultants will then look who the best call centres are and ring them up and find what the experience is like.

The key difference here is that one deeply cares about the outcome, and unlike a biscuit recipe, it can’t all be translated into step by step tasks.

What surprises me most is that even the most mature companies I work with don’t take the time to do this themselves. We sit in meetings discussing the future of a call centre and then realise that no one has ever visited it. We talk about how we want to ‘optimise’ it but we don’t know who the hero is, who we aspire to… because a quick search of ‘best call centres in the world’ is just a little bit more than we have time for.

The people that bring this care are artists. They don’t have to do this, they’d probably do just fine without it, but their work is their art. I once requested someone be extended on a project because they’d been asked to create a form to register your animal for a client. They’d been provided the spec, all the questions on the form… everything they needed. When they delivered it there was a wonderful picture of golden retriever at the top of the form. This is someone we can trust, this is an artist.

The artists may not get rewarded for the work, hopefully they do, but it’s not always the case. However, they’re the ones that make a difference in how we feel, and make true change possible. The receptionist at the doctor that makes you feel amazing, the call centre operator that calls you back when the call drops, the consultant who goes into one of your branches and transacts to feel what it’s like.

We need more artists.

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