People Still Matter (3 of 3): The Three Reasons You Lose Good People

People Still Matter (3 of 3): The Three Reasons You Lose Good People

Something I learned over the years, first framed around why customers buy. It explains why people stay with a leader just as well.

Pain, Process, and Purpose. You take away their pain. You make their life easier. You make them feel they are part of something bigger.

Pain. A broken process. An unfair workload. A manager who will not decide. The bigger the pain you remove, the more loyalty you earn. Most leaders let the small ones sit until they pile into a resignation nobody saw coming.

Process. Clear direction. Fast decisions. Not making good people chase three approvals to do their job. Every bit of friction you leave in their way is a tax you charge your own team, and they feel all of it.

Purpose. This is the one most leaders miss. People stay where they feel seen, trusted, like the work matters and like they matter. It is why those young agents two posts ago did not bite on more money. The money was there. The purpose was not.

You only find these by staying close enough to notice.

So if your best people are drifting, ask which of the three you stopped giving them. Pain you keep ignoring. A day you keep making harder. Or a purpose that disappeared.

Fix that, and people stay. Miss it, and no salary holds them.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Called It. Mostly.

Sometime ago I posted my top 10 tech predictions for 2026. Today Apple announced the iPhone Duo. A foldable, premium, priced around $2,000, built as a mature design rather than a novelty grab.

That is close to what I wrote in January. So I went back to grade the whole list, hits and misses both, because anyone can make predictions and almost nobody circles back to check their own.

Here is where things ended up.

AI browsers gain real traction. Hit, with a twist. The category exploded. Comet went from around 40,000 installs to over 10 million in six months, and Google built Gemini straight into Chrome. But one of the two browsers I named, ChatGPT Atlas, was shut down in August. The trend was right. One of my named players did not survive the year.

Streaming consolidation resets the CX bar. Right force, wrong names. I said Netflix and Warner would reshape the landscape. What actually happened was a $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner, with Netflix walking away after being outbid. I saw the consolidation coming. I got the acquirer wrong.

The middle layer of work starts disappearing. Hit. Coordination, documentation, and reporting are exactly where AI is absorbing the most.

AI wearables move beyond experiments. Almost. Heading that way, not fully mainstream yet.

Laptop chips hit peak competition. Hit. Panther Lake and Snapdragon X2 made this the most competitive processor year in a long time.

OpenAI moves closer to an IPO. Pending. Closer by most reporting, not confirmed. I filed it under possible but not guaranteed, and that is exactly where it sits.

Apple ships a foldable iPhone. Hit. Announced today, premium and priced as I called it.

AI raises new data privacy and security risks. Hit. This came up constantly all year, including at SuperAI in Singapore.

AI’s environmental cost becomes
unavoidable. Hit. Now a mainstream debate.

Here is why I do this at all.

Making predictions keeps my lens pointed at the future. It forces me to look ahead on purpose, so I can prepare for what is coming or help build it. That is the whole point. Staying ready for what is next.

On to the next ten.

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People Still Matter (2 of 3): It’s Not About The Money Money Money

We took on a project no team in the company had done at this scale. Early on, one problem kept surfacing. Productivity hours kept falling below standard.

It did not add up. A good chunk of these people were proven. Reliable, strong producers on other projects. On this one, they were inconsistent, and nobody could explain why from the numbers alone.

So I did what has worked for me for +25 years. I talked to them. Focus group discussions, a few one-on-ones. Basic call center 101. Shocking, I know.

And as it turns out, the work was not hard. It was boring. “Mind-numbingly boring” was the phrase one of them used. This was never a skill problem. The task was just tedious, and the people doing it were on the younger side.

Some humbling realizations. We had been throwing incentives at it. More money for hitting the numbers. And they were not biting. As a proud Gen X’er, that is hard to fully wrap my head around, but the money was not what they wanted. What they were missing was learning. The task taught them nothing, so they quietly checked out.

Once we understood that, the fix was straightforward. We restructured the work so it was far less tedious. Productivity followed.

None of that would have happened from a dashboard. The numbers would have told me productivity was down and pointed me straight at performance management, which was the wrong answer entirely. The real reason only came out because I sat down and asked.

That is the whole point of staying close. Sometimes the problem is not the one the data is showing you, and the only way to find the real one is to talk to the people living it.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

THIS FEELS RIGHT

Early in 2025, I tried to build a practical data annotation and labeling playbook. Limited online courses, a handful of research conversations with colleagues, and a lot of piecing things together myself. I was proud of it at the time. There were some genuinely good ideas in there.

Looking back, it was the tip of the iceberg.

What I get exposed to now, what I get to build, and what I learn on an ordinary week makes that early playbook look like a first sketch. The early work was solid for what I knew then. I just could not see how much more there was from where I was standing.

Here is a glimpse of the kind of work I mean.

People listening to hundreds of thousands of voice recordings and writing down every word, in a language no software exists to transcribe. The only way to teach a machine to hear a language is for people who speak it to write down what was said.

Doctors, lawyers, and finance specialists reading two AI answers to the same question and deciding which is better, then explaining why. That written explanation is the real product. It is how a model learns what a good answer looks like in a field where being confidently wrong is dangerous.

Footage recorded from a camera on a person’s head, labeled frame by frame, so a machine can learn to see the world the way a human actually sees it rather than from a fixed camera on a wall.

Earlier in the year I already felt like this was the right path. What I did not know was how much room there was to grow into it.

That room, and how fast it keeps opening, is the most energizing thing about where I am right now.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

People Still Matter (1 of 3)

Fired Up, Then Let Down

Everything is moving toward AI and automation, and it is easy to believe you can run a team from a dashboard. This is a three-part case for why staying close to your frontline matters now more than ever.

During an FGD a while back, one of the agents asked me a simple question. What is the future of the account.

On the surface it was a normal question. But something in how he asked it did not sit right. It felt like a stand-in for something else. So I kept asking.

This agent was good. Genuinely good. Strong with technology, C1 language, sharp instincts, the kind of person you notice without having to look hard. And he was not chasing anything. He was not in anyone’s office asking about promotion.

Leadership came to him. Unprompted. They told him he was being lined up for a promotion because he was that good.

Then they took it back. The client changed direction for the LOB he supported or something.

Later they came again. A different move this time, a possible supervisor role. He let himself believe it a second time.

Then they took that back too. A hiring freeze.

Here is what that sequence did. A highly motivated contributor turned into someone who just clocks in. He is still good at his job, the skill did not go anywhere. But the part of him that cared beyond the minimum is now gone… and that is on leadership. Not on him.

I do not know what the approach was supposed to be. If they wanted to retain him because he was excellent, then keep your word. If there was nothing concrete to offer, then do not dangle the one thing you cannot deliver. Dangling promotion is the lazy way to motivate someone. There are other ways to make a good person feel valued that do not require a promise you might have to break.

I would never have known any of this from a dashboard. His numbers were still fine. Nothing about him would have shown up as a problem in a report. The only reason I found out was because I was sitting in a room with the frontline, and because when he asked a vague question, I asked more.

That is the whole point of staying close. The most important things happening to your people rarely announce themselves. You have to be near enough to feel when a simple question is actually carrying something heavier.

More on that in this series.

#TeamLegendary#BPOEvolution#PragmaticLeadership#NextGenCX#FutureBPO#LGDR

You Dont Always Need ROI

A LONG time ago, I asked to attend an AI conference. I was a senior leader running future-focused programs, and part of my mandate was to stay at the forefront of where technology was heading. The event was directly relevant. I explained why.

The response was that I would need to put together an ROI document.

That was a completely reasonable ask. It is standard practice, it is what good governance looks like, and I understood the logic behind it. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else.

I did not fight it. I also did not go. I ended up watching YouTube recaps of the event instead. 😂

That was likely on me. I could have pushed. I could have built the case and connected the dots for them. I did not, and I own that.

Recently I asked to attend another one. Similar event, similar cost, similar reasoning. The answer came back almost immediately. Approved, go for it.

That speed was not carelessness. The judgment had already been done. The space was understood, the reasoning was clear, and the trust was already there.

Here is what I keep thinking about.
The outputs were not that different. I got good ideas from the YouTube recaps. I got good ideas from the event I attended. If you scored both on a spreadsheet, you might call it a wash.

What was completely different was everything the spreadsheet could not capture. One left me discouraged. The other left me energized, connected to people I would never have met otherwise, and feeling genuinely good about the whole thing.

No ROI document has a field for that.

There is no line item for a senior leader who quietly stops asking. No metric captures the difference between someone who feels trusted and someone who learned that the effort of asking is not worth it.

There is such a thing called VOI. Value on Investment exists because ROI leaves out morale, engagement, and trust.

Process matters. I am not arguing for throwing it out. I am saying the friction a request carries should reflect what is already known about the person asking and what is actually at stake in the answer.

What is a leader worth when they feel trusted? What does it cost when they stop asking?

Trust your people. Especially the ones who have already proven they deserve it. That trust comes back to you in ways no report will ever capture.

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Take A Chance on You

About one year ago I walked away from a role that I worked really hard to attain. I had a team that I built and loved and they loved me back, I think. People who cried when I left, so there’s that. I was really conflicted.

I left anyway. The inspiration was gone. The environment had stopped helping me grow. The stress had started outweighing the reasons to stay. So I took a gamble on something new and for the first time in a long time, I prioritized myself.

It did not work out.

The environment was not what I hoped, the chemistry was just wrong. And so we move on filled with lessons.

Here’s the beauty of it, in God’s perfect plan and timing, this situation led me back to mentors I had admired and respected for years.

And it placed me alongside a team of people, some of whom I have worked with before but have now become beyond impressive. Solutions oriented. Problem solvers. People who make hard work feel worth it.

I am happier and more fulfilled now than I have been in a long time.

The work is still difficult, because what work isn’t. But it is meaningful. It is future focused. We are not protecting an old way of doing things or talking about what to cut. We are building what comes next.

I am almost scared to lose it. That is how good it feels.

So here is what I would tell anyone reading this. When you stop feeling it, when the environment is draining you and the reasons to stay run thin, it is okay to take the gamble.

Things can work out.

But not on their own. You have to be a good person.

You have to work hard. Stay true to your values, never compromise on that. Life is too short.

You have to build a reliable network that will actually have your back when you need it.

And even then, nobody is coming to save you. You still do the heavy lifting yourself.

Do that, and take the leap, and you might land in one of the best and most fulfilling chapters of your life.

That is where I am now. And everyone deserves to feel like this.

#TeamLegendary #LeaderPragmatips #PragmaticLeadership

Notes from SuperAI (3 of 3): Security Is About to Get Personal

One idea at SuperAI deserves more airtime than it got. Security.

The uncomfortable truth is simple. The attacker only needs to win once. You have to defend everything, every time. They have to find one opening. That math has always favored the attacker and AI is about to tilt it further.

Anything in the cloud, in your systems, in your processes that can be hacked with AI will be. Powerful open models that anyone can run without guardrails are going to reshape the security picture over the coming year. One practical suggestion from the floor: reduce your dependence on the cloud where you can, and keep more of what matters local.

That part sounds bleak. Here is the part that does not.

Every one of those threats is a job. Someone has to verify. Someone has to validate.

Someone has to defend against the bots and the fake agents flooding in. Someone has to be the human in the loop who catches what the machine misses and confirms what the machine claims.

For all the talk about AI eliminating work, this is the opposite. A whole category of human work is opening up around trust, and it will only get bigger. Checking. Confirming. Securing. Judging what is real.

The people who lean into that now, who build the skills to verify and secure and validate, are going to be in demand in a way most people are not seeing yet.

The threat is real. So is the opportunity sitting right next to it.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Notes from SuperAI (2 of 3): No One Has It Figured Out

Here is the most reassuring thing I took from the biggest AI event in Asia. Nobody actually knows what they are doing.

Not the founders. Not the labs. Not the people on stage with the polished decks. Everyone is experimenting, trying things, watching what happens, and adjusting. The confidence you see in the headlines is mostly assembled after the fact.

That is not a knock on anyone. It is how every major shift has always worked.

The mistake is thinking you need to have it all figured out before you move. You do not. You need to start, stay close to what happens, and adjust in real time. Pivot when the situation calls for it instead of holding course just because it was the plan.

The capability keeps revealing itself as you go. You discover what is possible by doing, not by planning. Nobody at that event mapped out where they would be three years ago and arrived there on schedule. They moved, they learned, they corrected, and the path appeared underneath them.

So if you are waiting to feel certain before you start, you will be waiting a long time.
Start. Stay close. Adjust. That is the whole game right now.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Notes from SuperAI (1 of 3): You Can Build Almost Anything Now

You can build almost anything now. The infrastructure, the capital, the talent, the dependency. The things that used to stand between an idea and a working product have mostly dropped away.
You still need resources. Just not at the scale that used to stop people before they started.

That sounds freeing. It also takes away your excuses.

When the barriers were high, you could blame the barriers. No budget. No engineers. No infrastructure. Those are mostly gone now. What is left is the part nobody wants to admit. Most people do not actually know what problem they want to solve.

My favorite line at SuperAI was this. Stop looking for glamorous things to build. Find a real problem and solve it.

One of the richest companies in the world sells hangers. The ones hotels put in your closet. Not exciting. Not visionary. Nobody is giving a keynote about hangers. But someone looked at a boring, real problem and built an empire solving it quietly while everyone else chased the impressive version.

The constraint now is not access. It is attention. What are you actually willing to look at long enough to solve.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR