Legitimate Leadership: Leading Employees from Taking to Giving in the Call Center.

Every employer struggles with the issue of employee engagement, and more so within the intense call center environment. Legitimate Leadership addresses: How to get employees to come to work every day and put in their best effort? How to keep employee turnover down? Leaders with legitimacy, in an organization where leaders and employees trust each other, will gain employees who contribute willingly and accept accountability for delivering their best results.

Key take-aways from the presentation:

Leaders are followed when employees feel that the leader is interested in their well-being.
To lead your business to success, cultivate trusting relationships between employees and the leaders of the business.
An empowered employee can proactively and willingly contribute to the business.
Employees at all levels accept accountability for delivering their best performance when expectations are clear.
The intent of the leader is all important.

Legitimate Leadership

The Legitimate Leadership model addresses the issue of willingness at work. The model grew from research in the gold mining industry in the late 1980’s, where it was found that the trust of workers in management on mines did not correlate to such factors as politics or race, nor to physical conditions in mines and hostels, labor mix, rates of pay or the presence or not of unions. Instead it was determined that management-employee relations improved or worsened to the extent that management responded to the concerns or problems of employees. Managers were accepted or rejected on the strength of their perceived interest in the well-being of their employees.

Subsequent research has shown that employees’ perceptions of management’s interest in their well-being is not determined by the sophistication of the human resources practices and systems, but rather by the relationship between each employee and their immediate manager. When individual managers have a genuine concern for their people as human beings and enable them to realize the best in themselves, they will willingly contribute to the success of the organization.

The Legitimate Leadership model has been applied in over 300 organizations in 30 countries over the past 25 years. What Legitimate Leadership does is help leaders at every level to transform their organization through applying the Legitimate Leadership model, so the organization is characterized by:

Leadership Legitimacy,
Trust between employees and management,
Willing contribution by employees,
Employees at all levels taking accountability.

Speaker: Lulu de Beer

Ba Law – University of Johannesburg
Honors International Politics – University of Pretoria
Certificate in Coaching – University of Stellenbosch Business School
General Management Program – Harvard Business School
Board development and Leadership – GIBS

Lulu was born and raised in Johannesburg. She entered the business world as a generalist, building her career in the South African Credit Industry. A significant part of this career was spent in the call center environment, developing a specific skill in people leadership.

Leading large divisions including call center environments of more than 2000 agents she gained extensive corporate experience. She was part of the growth of leading organizations in the credit industry including building a company from a small centralized player, to a large national industry leader.

Lulu implemented and applied the Legitimate Leadership methodology over more than 20 years. She was party to the development of many young employees from the call center agent level to middle, senior and executive management levels. She has coached leaders for the past 10 years at all levels of the organization.

After holding various executive roles, she determined that her keen interest in the impact of leaders on the productivity of their teams, her belief in the potential of every individual and her experience of the corporate world could be applied to contribute more fully by focusing on the development of leaders in all spheres of organizations, culminating in her exiting the corporate world to become an executive coach and associate of Legitimate Leadership.

Lulu has based her coaching practice in Johannesburg where she lives with her husband and 2 daughters.