Most contact centres are set up to develop their managers to drive metrics and to be coaches…but this is the wrong focus.

They’re actually talent scouts.

We’ve built entire management training programmes around motivation techniques, call monitoring, and performance dashboards. But recent research analysing 20 years of data from 200,000 employees reveals something different.

When your team fails, who’s accountable?

If you said “they are”, we need to talk.

I see this confusion constantly in contact centres. Leaders think they’re empowering their teams by making them “accountable” for outcomes. They believe delegation means handing off accountability along with responsibility.

It doesn’t.

You can only delegate responsibility. Accountability stays with you.

The distinction sounds semantic until you realise it shapes everything about how your team performs, how much they trust you, and whether they’ll actually take ownership of their work.

I started noticing a pattern when I spoke to contact centre team leaders. Most of them had never received training before being promoted. The impact was visible everywhere. In their stress levels. In their teams. In the impossible position they’d been put in.

That training room cost a fortune to set up. But it sits empty most weeks. When it is used, operational managers resent pulling agents off the phones. Agents know they’ll return to a backlog. And everyone secretly knows that whatever gets taught won’t stick anyway. Yet contact centres keep investing in training programmes, booking external providers, and wondering why nothing changes. That’s the problem training was meant to solve. Except it won’t.