This week, I’m so pleased to welcome Clayton Drotsky to the show, all the way from South Africa.
Partial Transcript:
Dave: So, how many years have you spent working within call centers there?
Clayton: 18 years.
Dave: 18 years. You must have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when you’ve been working there.
Clayton: Oh, yes, definitely. I’ve had people who are leaders who may have got all their leadership qualities from watching The Sopranos. I’ve had leaders like the one I’ve just explained, who have been unbelievable. And that’s why leaders have such a massive impact. You add value, and you can inspire people to do and be better every single day, and you shouldn’t do yourself an injustice. Having a great leader like I had had a massive impact on the rest of my career, but I could have been unlucky, and I could have had a really bad leader, and I could have had a negative impact on my life. So when you look at a toxic call center, it’s because well, my feeling, at least, is because the people who are in the leadership roles are there for the wrong reasons. they’re there to make money, which is obviously what everyone wants to do, but they forget that the people that are in the call center, if they enjoy what they do and they find satisfaction in what they do, they’ll look forward to doing it, they’ll enjoy doing it, and they’ll accelerate it, too naturally. But that’s what you want. You want that feeling.
Dave: So this is really, really fascinating to me because this podcast series was actually, inspired by a gentleman called, Michelle Falcon. It’s a great book, actually. It’s called People First culture. I really strongly recommend it. People First Culture build a lasting company by shifting your focus from profits to people. So what you’re really saying is that’s exactly, without even knowing about that book, basically that’s what you’ve been doing for the last 18 years, correct?
Clayton: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And lucky that it happened to me, that I was able to understand what good leadership looked like and was able to implement it myself.
Dave: Well, I just find that that’s fantastic. so when you look at toxic companies, what you mentioned obviously, about leaders that are just solely focused on, the money side of things. And obviously The Sopranos, that’s their training guide. But, what else? Talk about toxicity. Talk about some of the lessons that you’ve learned. And that when you walk into a company now in your current role, that you can immediately spot what toxic elements are there.
Clayton: I’ve been to some companies where people compare busyness. They’ll, make some of the remarks. Like they might make a remark when they come back from lunch, just come back from lunch, probably have 120 emails. Again, why would you say that? Why are we comparing busyness? Why are we putting our boundaries do we not want people to ask us things because we don’t know how to do it? Is that why we pretending to be busy? Or why is busyness such an important thing to us to compete in? And that, I must admit, I’ve heard often, and that’s kind of a sign for me, that the people are not there as a team. They’re working individually. And when you start comparing busyness, there could be boundaries up. they are afraid of taking on challenges. They don’t celebrate the victories of others. and it almost rolls into what a fixed mindset looks like.
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or get him at https://growthcrew.co.uk/
Get in touch with Dave on [email protected]