The Unpolished Leader

Where messy meets meaningful

Tag: leadership stories

  • The Problem Is Not the People. It Is the System.

    Some teams are drowning in process. Others are drowning in its absence. Both are still gasping for air.

    And yet, when performance dips, when turnover spikes, or when burnout hits the tipping point, leaders look at the people first. They ask who needs coaching, who is not “resilient,” or who is falling short.

    But in most cases, the real problem is the system.

    Not broken people. Broken design.

    I have lost count of the times I have been asked to “fix” a team. Often, what they actually needed was a functional schedule. Sometimes, it was a feedback loop. Other times, a decision tree that does not require a PhD to navigate. Teams are not fragile. They are tired of working against the very systems that are supposed to support them.

    I wrote about my first leadership job in Why I Stayed. Here is the short version.

    We had a 35% abandon rate. No structured breaks. Phones ringing into the void. Frustrated customers. Burned-out staff. Turnover rising.

    The common narrative would have blamed the reps. Said they were not committed. They could not handle the pressure. They needed more training. That maybe they were not a “good fit.”

    But the issue was not them. It was the structure, or the lack of it.

    Once we introduced a simple, data-informed schedule and gave the team a say in shaping it, everything shifted. Calls got answered. Morale lifted. Performance improved. Not because the people changed, but because the system did.

    Here is what broken systems often sound like:

    • “That is just how we do it.”
    • “We were told we could not change this.”
    • “The process says…”
    • “We are too busy to fix that right now.”
    • “It is not ideal, but people get used to it.”

    These phrases do not just signal dysfunction. They signal resignation. They are the sound of people adapting to failure instead of fixing it.

    Meanwhile, leaders stack on more training, more tools, more pressure, hoping people will “rise to the challenge.” They will, until they cannot. Then you will call it burnout, when what really happened is systemic failure.

    If your operations depend on heroics, your problem is not your team. It is your infrastructure.

    If performance varies wildly across shifts or teams, you do not need more motivation. You need consistency.

    Before you coach performance, audit design. If your team is gasping for air, the leak is structural.

  • Why I Stayed

    Why I Stayed

    I did not step into customer service leadership because call queues excited me. I took my first leadership role because I genuinely wanted to make things better for the people calling in, and for the teams trying to help them.

    I stayed because someone handed me a call report.

    Early in my career, I took a job as a Member Service Manager at a regional credit union. On my very first day, my new boss delivered the news: our call abandon rate was 35%. Let me say that again – 35%. Over a third of the people who called us for help gave up before anyone even answered.

    This was more than two decades ago. There were no chatbots, no mobile apps, and barely a functional website. If you could not reach someone by phone, your only option was to visit a branch. And if you could not do that? You simply went without help.

    I spent my first day observing. It did not take long to find the problem: the team had no structured break or lunch schedules. People stepped away whenever they wanted, leaving phones ringing and callers frustrated enough to hang up.

    The fix seemed obvious. But as anyone who has led a team knows, obvious and easy are not the same thing. I set out to find a solution.

    I found Mary, the person everyone on the team looked up to, and asked for her read on things. When I shared what I had observed, she nodded and said, “That is easy to fix. If you create a schedule, I can help you sell it.”

    So we did.

    But the thing that changed everything was not the schedule. It was the report.

    In those days, call data arrived on paper, by hand, a day after the calls occurred. And even in that format, a stack of pages delivered to my desk each morning, it was extraordinary. Call arrival patterns. Staffing levels. Abandoned call percentages. Average speed of answer. Wrap-up times. All the numbers I never knew I needed until they were in front of me.

    I built our first structured schedule from that report. Mary championed it to the team. And we watched, week by week, as the abandonment rate came down. Calls got shorter. We started cross-selling effectively. Turnover dropped. Not because of a strategy deck or a leadership initiative, but because we looked at what was actually happening and adjusted.

    That paper report did not just fix a broken system. It handed me a compass I have carried ever since.

    I have led a lot of teams since then, across several industries. The problems are never exactly the same. But the approach rarely changes: find out what is actually happening, find the person the team already trusts, and build something together that the data can tell you whether it worked.

    I started The Unpolished Leader because I kept looking for writing that reflected that version of the work —the version that happens between the org chart and the floor, between the strategy and the reality—and I mostly couldn’t find it. So here we are.

    More stories to come.