There’s a moment on almost every engagement I run.
I’ve been brought in to fix something specific: a complaints process, a strategy, a team that keeps losing people. A few weeks in, someone catches me after a meeting. “Can I pick your brain about something?”
Sometimes it’s a team leader. Sometimes it’s someone senior who has just inherited a new team. On one recent engagement, the director asked whether I’d spend some time with each of their direct reports, alongside the work I’d actually been hired to do.
The questions are rarely about the brief. How do I get this past the leadership team? How do we get improve performance and our ways of working without burning people out? How do I bring change into an operation that’s already stretched? What would you do?
I’ve always said yes. Often, it’s the most useful thing I do there. And something I also get a lot from.
Where it comes from
My first job after university was in a call centre. Not a contact centre: a call centre. Three hours of training, then straight on the phones. I still feel sorry for the customers I spoke to in those first few weeks.
Nobody mentored me. You learnt by getting it wrong in front of customers until you got it wrong less often. Years later, as a new manager, someone handed me Stephen Covey’s *The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People*. The book isn’t really the point. The point is that somebody thought I’d need it before I knew I did.
When I got the chance to build a service operation from a blank sheet of paper at Pure Planet, developing people was a big part of the job. The company was growing fast and changing constantly, and the only way to bring people with us was to invest in them. Some of the people I first met on the frontline went on to become service managers and change managers while others moved into completely different careers in teams across the business.
That’s still one of the things I’m proudest of from those years, and none of it showed up in a KPI.
Why it keeps happening
I think people ask because of where they are in their careers and having a ‘safe’ conversation with someone from outside the business is valuable to them.
Most leaders in service operations got there the way I did. They were promoted from the floor because they were good at the job, then promoted again because they were good at that. At every step the job changes more than the title suggests, and the support thins out as you go up.
By the time someone is running a team, or a whole operation, they’re expected to just know. How to build a business case. How to negotiate with finance about headcount. How to plan for peak periods. How to bring change into an operation without breaking it. What automation will do to the work that’s left.
Many of them have learnt everything they know inside one organisation. Good instincts, real knowledge, but no outside reference points. When someone turns up who has run several operations, the obvious thing to do is ask.
But can’t they just ask AI?
It’s a fair question, and I’ve asked it myself.
AI is now very good at answers. Frameworks, first drafts, the standard way to approach a problem, all at eleven at night and for nothing. If mentoring were only passing on knowledge, I’d struggle to justify it.
But AI only knows what you tell it, and people describe their operation the way they wish it worked. It tends to help with the question you asked rather than tell you it’s the wrong question. And nobody feels they’ve let a chat window down when they don’t have the difficult conversation they said they’d have.
The managers I’d work with are already using these tools, and getting plausible advice with no context. Part of a mentor’s job now is helping them work out which of those answers would hold up in their operation and which would fall apart.
What I’m offering
So I’m making it deliberate. I’ll still have the corridor conversations on client work. That doesn’t change. This is for when someone wants more than half an hour.
It’s for people who lead service, customer and contact centre operations: capable managers their organisation wants to back rather than replace, newly promoted heads of CX and contact centres, and the people running what we’ve built together after an engagement ends.
Backed by your organisation - we agree with the sponsor at the start what good looks like. I spend time in the operation, not just on video calls. Two sessions a month, with me available in between, and reviews with the sponsor at the midpoint and the end. What we discuss stays between us.
An operational read - half a day in your operation, followed by a written view of what I saw, the three things I’d work on, and whether mentoring is the right answer. Sometimes it isn’t.
One to one - or leaders backing themselves.
Sessions are about your real work: the dashboard you don’t trust, the restructure you’re drafting, the business case that keeps coming back, the conversation you’re putting off.
The test
The point of mentoring is to make itself unnecessary. The best moment is when someone stops asking what I’d do and starts telling me what they’re going to do.
If you lead an operation, or you’re backing someone who does, and you’d like to pick my brain properly, book a free 30-minute call here or message me on LinkedIn.