Effort Over Talent

We’ve all seen those glorified talent shows on TV, the ones who pit performers against one another for weeks on end before ultimately deciding to give the prize to the naturally gifted little girl with the angel voice. With the amount of praise society lumps on the naturally talented you might start to think a lack of talent is a weakness. But in the real world we see things differently.

Finding someone who is naturally talented at their job is a pretty rare thing. So in a place like Telnet, which has hundreds of staff, it’s pretty unlikely that each and every agent on the phone is going to have a natural talent for communication. In fact many of our staff are in the call centre business because they are awkward speakers – phone calls and emails being much preferred to face to face human contact. We find that our agents have something much more valuable than talent to offer and that is an unending supply of effort. It doesn’t take talent to turn up on time and it doesn’t take talent to put on a head set and answer calls. But it does take commitment, passion and energy.

Much of our success can be attributed to the effort put in by our agents and staff. It didn’t take talent to put in those extra hours at election time and it didn’t take talent to keep a positive attitude. Nor did it take talent for our inbound agents to show a willingness to learn extra outbound campaigns.

So sorry reality TV, you can keep your prodigy boy bands. We will take effort and good old fashioned hard work any day.