The grumpy vs talkative example and the Alice vs Bob example remind me of the knowledgeability vs competence debates that I used to have before and after conducting interviews. When I first entered the corporate world I thought knowledge was paramount, I learned very quickly that likeability and team synergy are valued much more. The best line workers who couldn’t break into the management team even after years of hard work often wondered what they were doing wrong, their metrics and productivity were consistently the highest and they got along with everyone on their teams. Why weren’t they advancing? My advice to them was focus less on productivity and more on impressing the boss.
Corporate real estate is what I call it when I want to sound fancy. Really, it was a call center for a relocation company which was a subsidiary of a large real estate company.
Our department was like a dispatch service, we took calls from customers (of companies we had contracts with) and after a short exposition-heavy conversation we’d refer them to the real estate firms that were under the parent company’s umbrella.
A real estate agent would be automatically assigned and receive our referral. It was free and if they closed with our agent they’d get a kickback (from the referral fee that we took out of the agent’s commission).
I was a supervisor and quit 2 years ago but recently learned that the department was downsized and merged with another because I think they realized 10 people could do the work they had ~60 people doing: 1 director, 3 managers, 7 supervisors, ~40 line workers and ~5 administrative support workers (these last 2 numbers would often fluctuate).
The grumpy vs talkative example and the Alice vs Bob example remind me of the knowledgeability vs competence debates that I used to have before and after conducting interviews. When I first entered the corporate world I thought knowledge was paramount, I learned very quickly that likeability and team synergy are valued much more. The best line workers who couldn’t break into the management team even after years of hard work often wondered what they were doing wrong, their metrics and productivity were consistently the highest and they got along with everyone on their teams. Why weren’t they advancing? My advice to them was focus less on productivity and more on impressing the boss.
Curious what industry this is if you don’t mind saying
Corporate real estate is what I call it when I want to sound fancy. Really, it was a call center for a relocation company which was a subsidiary of a large real estate company.
Our department was like a dispatch service, we took calls from customers (of companies we had contracts with) and after a short exposition-heavy conversation we’d refer them to the real estate firms that were under the parent company’s umbrella.
A real estate agent would be automatically assigned and receive our referral. It was free and if they closed with our agent they’d get a kickback (from the referral fee that we took out of the agent’s commission).
I was a supervisor and quit 2 years ago but recently learned that the department was downsized and merged with another because I think they realized 10 people could do the work they had ~60 people doing: 1 director, 3 managers, 7 supervisors, ~40 line workers and ~5 administrative support workers (these last 2 numbers would often fluctuate).