As leaders in customer experience operations, we're constantly seeking effective mechanisms to elevate both employee engagement and performance. McKinsey & Company's recent article, "The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory" by Bob Sternfels , Daniel Pacthod , Kurt Strovink , and Hugh Wyman H. , cuts through the noise with four specific, actionable leadership practices that address the actual challenges CX leaders face today.
The McKinsey article highlights four emerging best practices that define effective leadership:
1. Engage with ALL key stakeholders 🤝
McKinsey emphasizes the importance of "rigorous discussions across the organization—among senior leaders, with frontline workers, with the board, and so on." This inclusive approach to stakeholder engagement recognizes that frontline workers are not merely executors of strategy but essential participants in organizational dialogue.
2. Enroll (and re-enroll) the team 📋
The authors stress that leaders must "ensure that everyone is fully enrolled in the company's vision and strategy and willing to contribute of their own free will." This goes beyond mere buy-in as enrolled employees are "self-disciplined, self-motivated, and more likely than others to enforce standards."
McKinsey's emphasis on "reenrolling" recognizes that commitment naturally fades over time and must be continuously renewed. As business conditions shift and day-to-day challenges accumulate, leaders must regularly reconnect team members to the organization's purpose, not just once but repeatedly throughout the employee journey.
3. Build an operating model wired for speed 🏎
Leaders need to "explore models that allow for speed: clear decision-making rights, few layers of bureaucracy, and tech-enabled information sharing." The article notes that such approaches "create a performance edge, increase productivity, instill accountability, and substantially speed up decision making."
4. Emphasize a culture of trust 👍
McKinsey cites the trust equation: "credibility times reliability times intimacy divided by self-orientation." A critical task for today's leader is to "analyze where the organization is strongest and weakest along each element of the trust equation, and systematically address any issues."
While these principles are compelling, many CX leaders face a common challenge: How do we actually implement these practices in our day-to-day operations? How do we create mechanisms that allow senior leaders to meaningfully engage with frontline workers? How do we foster genuine enrollment rather than compliance? How do we build trust across organizational hierarchies?
This is where innovative approaches like TouchPoint One's A-GAME Leagues offer CX operations leaders a practical pathway to putting McKinsey's framework into action.
A-GAME Leagues transforms contact centers into engaging competitive environments inspired by fantasy sports, creating a structured system where McKinsey's leadership principles come to life naturally through the mechanics of play.
The platform operates through two complementary components:
Scoring is based on performance metrics that align with organizational goals—quality, ESAT, customer satisfaction, engagement, attendance, or balanced scorecards that combine multiple KPIs.
1. Engage with ALL key stakeholders 🤝
A-GAME Leagues creates natural pathways for engagement between leadership and frontline workers. Through the Xtreme feature, senior leaders don't just talk about engaging with agents, they actively participate alongside them in a shared experience. This creates authentic opportunities for dialogue, feedback, coaching, mentoring, and collaboration that cut across organizational hierarchies.
2. Enroll (and re-enroll) the team 📋
The fantasy sports gamification model inherently drives deep enrollment. Agents and supervisors aren't merely complying with performance goals, but become personally invested in their team's success. The competitive framework transforms abstract organizational objectives into tangible, meaningful targets that participants genuinely want to achieve.
3. Build an operating model wired for speed 🏎
A-GAME Leagues establishes clear metrics, provides technology-enabled information sharing through dashboards, and creates a regular cadence through its tournament structure. Leaders and teams receive immediate feedback on performance, allowing for quick adjustments and rapid decision-making.
4. Emphasize a culture of trust 👍
Perhaps most importantly, A-GAME Leagues builds trust by putting senior leaders in the game alongside frontline employees. When executives draft and support teams of agents through the Xtreme feature, they demonstrate credibility (by showing they understand the business), reliability (by consistently participating), and intimacy (by sharing in both victories and setbacks), while reducing self-orientation (by focusing on their team's development and success).
As leaders committed to not just talking about employee engagement but actually making a direct impact, A-GAME Leagues offers a mechanism that makes exercising McKinsey's best practices not only possible but deeply fulfilling and demonstrably effective.
The most forward-thinking CX operations leaders understand that their frontline employees need more than theoretical engagement initiatives—they need structured systems that create meaningful connections, foster authentic motivation, and build genuine trust across the organization.
A-GAME Leagues transforms McKinsey's 21st-century leadership framework from an aspirational vision into everyday practice, offering CX ops visionaries a proven path to walking the talk of employee engagement and leadership development.
📞Contact me if you're interested in learning how TouchPoint One's Acuity platform and A-GAME Leagues can transform your organization in this era of unprecedented AI-driven disruption. As the CX landscape undergoes radical transformation, connection, trust, empathy, transparency, and collaboration aren't mere theoretical concepts, but vital operational necessities that demand immediate action. Visionaries who implement these principles now will be the ones who thrive in tomorrow's reality. 🚀
