What About Me

Kenneth posted in his blog to ask me to talk more about myself instead of some boring federal government stuff. Hahaha. I never intend to blog about my personal life too much on public blogs. Maybe I am a shy person lol. Its just kinda weird. Anyway, I will try to write something here.

Talking about myself, let me think....hmmm.... Ok, here it is, I was an ambitious person. WAS. But actually, I still am. It depends on the definition of ambitious. I was a career minded person in the past. I seek to excel, perform and achieve more than what I was supposed to do. I was a top telecollector for 2 years consecutively and remained in the top rank every month. It was no easy feat. The agents would asked me how I achieved that.

Yes, I was ambitious, I wanted to climb the corporate ladder. Performance wise, I shared my experience that speed and negotiation skills were key to achieving good performance. But it was more than that. I remembered there was something more than just trying to hit the top targets. I had a persistent voice in my mind that is even more so important than just my personal incentive. It was this thought that kept me going, pushing my limits and exceeding them month on month. CE (Collection Efficiency) is always knocking in my head. It is the focus, the centre of every action and speech that I execute. I watched CE closely, and if they were lacking behind the targets, I pushed myself to work even harder to help the company meet them. Working cohesively as a team is extremely important. No one person, no matter how efficient he or she is, can help company achieve a good CE by himself. Everyone in the team must be united in thought, speech and action. Every member of the team needs to do his job properly and even more so, for the one whose scores are leading. If his scores are leading, he too needs to lead the team to achieve company's targets. I remembered when I wanted to give a particular customer a final reminder call, even thoughh I knew he would be paying, I would still place a review call to be made 2 or 3 days later. I knew doing that means sacrificing my incentive, but not doing that, customers may forget to pay and ultimately, CE suffers. I placed a higher priority on the company's profits then my own incentive. Responsibility is the word. Being responsible to the team members, our customers, our shareholders. With these thoughts in mind, I did not really watch my incentive closely or monitor my scores. It somehow just fits into place nicely.

A good website which I came across few years back by Jim Collins, I bought the book as well, but I think I left it with Adit. Oop. Here's the link.

When I subsequently got promoted to the role of Dialer Specialist, I learned not only how to manage the dialer operations efficiently, but also on managing the team. It was a different experience. There are more complicated issues such as managing human relations, customer relations, interdepartment relations. It is also in this role that I started to experience the word called "power".

I am not a powerful person nor do I wish to be one. However, power comes naturally to those seated in higher positions. Power, to me, is a privilege. It is an honour to have, for its ability to create goodness. It is so important that power must always lie in the hands of the morally ethical person. If power is abused, suffering will ensue. However, the illusion of power sometimes mislead people to think they have the authority to do what they want irregardless of others. This thought perpetuates their minds and they forgot they are a person, a being, no different from any others.

Customers have the power to complain and grumble. Some think customers are always right. I do not agree. When I was a telecollector, from time to time, I would lecture my customers on their poor money management skills. There was this customer who was the solebreadwinner, he had couple of kids, and took loans from a few banks. His pay was meagre and he was practically paying one bank for one month and delaying another 3 months, just enough to keep himself going to avoid bankruptcy charges. I asked him why he took our loan. He told me he wanted to pay his installments for his furniture. Not only that, he had also bought some other expensive stuff. I was fuming mad when I heard it. He was being so irresponsible.

In my current role as a team lead, I do not seem to have changed much haha. When customers wanted to speak to manager, they probably would have thought they can get anything their way. Not through me. I probably would have gotten a few of them in shock. Of course, the way to structure my words and tone would have to be slightly different depending on circumstances.

Yes, I am still ambitious. But perhaps, in a different way. My learning path changes as I grow. Leading to goodness, I hope. I do not have a desire to climb the corporate ladder. I realised the higher I climb, the worse I see in people. It is a complicated and complex web up there and I have no wish to participate in it. I loved the simple things in life, the simple people who talks about mundane things (of course, without silly gossips). I seem to find myself happier that way. I am not trying to avoid seeing the bad side of things, they do exist as and they will exist so long people exist. Humans are naturally imperfect and with imperfection, both good and evil will be on the surface of Earth. This is the natural way of life.