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I did not sit down to write “More Than a Motto” with contact center QA and training in mind. I wrote it because I kept seeing smart people exhausted by systems that quietly worked against the outcomes they cared about. A lot of those lessons came from my time inside contact centers.
On the surface, our centers said all the right things. “Customers first.” “Every interaction matters.” “We’re people powered.” The posters and town hall decks were flawless. Yet when I looked at the mechanics of the work, I saw something different. Scorecards, handle time targets, occupancy expectations, and staffing models sent a louder, clearer message than any value statement ever did.
If you live in quality or training, you sit in the middle of that tension every day. You know what “good” looks like. You can hear it in a call in seconds. Then you watch the way work is designed, and you see how often the system erodes the very behaviors you are trying to build.
That gap is what More Than a Motto tackles. Underneath the stories and models is a simple claim. Work either reinforces the promises we make, or it unravels them in a hundred small ways. There is not much in between.
Early in my leadership career, I thought transparency would solve everything. If my team saw what I saw, they would understand my priorities and act accordingly. So I started sharing more data.
One month, I rolled out a detailed performance report to my contact center team. It had several metrics on it. Quality, first contact resolution, schedule adherence, and average handle time (AHT). AHT lived in the top-left corner. I did not think twice about it.
In coaching conversations, I talked about listening. I talked about ownership. I talked about doing the right thing for the customer. Then, every week, I handed them a report that visually crowned speed as the anchor metric.
No one told agents to rush. No one wrote an email saying, “Handle time now outranks everything.” Yet the behavior on the floor changed quickly. Calls tightened. Probing questions dropped. Agents cut customers off with “anything else?” just a little too fast. Service became more mechanical.
Nothing in my intent had shifted. The work, however, was telling a different story. Placement taught priority. The system spoke louder than my coaching. That moment exposed an uncomfortable truth: people learn more from how work reacts to their effort than from what leaders say about their effort.
As QA and training professionals, you see this pattern in sharper focus than almost anyone else.
When metrics start to slide, most organizations follow a familiar playbook.
They ask QA to review more contacts.
They ask training to refresh content.
They ask supervisors to coach more frequently and with more urgency.
You get more sessions, more dashboards, more talking points. There is a short-term lift, then things settle back to where they were. The instinct is understandable. Coaching and training are visible levers. They feel responsive. They show “we’re doing something.”
Here is the problem I see over and over. We keep investing in people as if they are the root issue, when in reality they are compensating for design problems in the work.
Consider a few scenarios you might recognize:
In each case, the message and the mechanics collide. Agents are not confused. They are doing what the system rewards and protecting themselves from what the system penalizes. Coaching that does not address that collision asks people to carry the cost personally.
I do not believe most quality issues come from a lack of care or effort. They come from a mismatch between what we say we value and how we have wired the day-to-day rhythm of the work. That rhythm is where “More Than a Motto” lives.
The central idea of the book is that purpose only lasts when it has a rhythm inside the work. Not a campaign. Not a launch moment. A repeatable pattern that shows up in decisions, trade-offs, and habits.
Every contact center already runs on rhythms:
These patterns are not neutral. They teach agents what truly matters. Over time, they either reinforce your promises or quietly replace them.
In “More Than a Motto,” I describe the RHYTHM Operating System as a way to name and own those patterns. RHYTHM breaks down into six leadership jobs that need structure behind them if you want purpose to survive pressure:
We will dive deeper into the RHYTHM Operating System in the next issue of The Connection.
About Justin: I’m a keynote speaker, researcher, and advisor who helps organizations connect employee and customer experience to drive better business results. I’ve spent more than 20 years inside complex service environments, working with leaders across operations, HR, and customer experience to redesign how work gets done. To learn more about my book, “More Than a Motto,” or to explore workshops for your QA and training teams, contact me at justin@metricsherpa.com or visit morethanamotto.com.