The Three Pillars of Excellence: Skills That Define Top Workforce Management Professionals

I've had the privilege of collaborating with numerous exceptional workforce management professionals throughout my career. Looking back, I've noticed three key skills that were consistently present in those I deeply respect.

1. Intellectual Curiosity: This quality signifies an inherent curiosity about how things work. Different companies employ distinct procedures to serve clients and engage via various communication channels. Accomplished WFM professionals exhibit curiosity by delving into primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of inquiry across these facets. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of a company's operations enables meaningful recommendations for optimization. Without this curiosity, important detailed questions are overlooked, hindering progress in addressing bottlenecks and enhancing capacity.

2. Perseverance: Organizations rarely seek WFM professionals if they anticipate easy change. Often, WFM experts enter companies with established processes and protective barriers against change. Their initial responsibility is comprehending the business's functioning and suggesting initiatives for improvement. However, solving optimization challenges requires enduring multiple rejections, setbacks, disinterest, and obstacles. Top-tier WFM professionals remain undeterred, persistently tackling challenges to enhance the business.

3. Empathy: Novice WFM professionals might misconstrue business barriers to their recommendations as personal. Having experienced this frustration myself after investing weeks into understanding a business, offering recommendations, and receiving rejections, I understand the feeling. It's crucial in such moments to empathize with the stakeholders who reject the proposals. These stakeholders likely faced disappointment from prior initiatives that underperformed or fear the upcoming changes' impact on their roles. Skilled WFM professionals practice empathy, addressing stakeholders' core concerns and ensuring their voices are heard.

If you're a technically adept WFM professional, consider integrating these skill sets into your toolkit. Developing these skills takes time and arguably requires more extensive mastery than technical proficiency. Nonetheless, committing to lifelong practice and refinement will elevate your expertise and impact in the field.