Reversing the Contact Center Leadership Drift

Here are two connected conversations that broke employee trust without anyone noticing:

• A Filipino agent is coached for mishandling a timecard issue.
• Later, a Honduran agent receives the same coaching from the same supervisor: same tone, same words, and same intent.

Both agents nodded. Both say they understood. But one leaves feeling dismissed. The other, micromanaged. The supervisor leaves thinking it went well.

Nothing looks wrong on the surface. No red flags in the HR system. No policy violations. No complaints. But something happened. Trust fractured. And employee engagement and morale just dropped a few degrees colder.

This is how Supervisor Drift begins—not with a blowup - but with a whisper.

It’s not just a mismatch in communication style. It’s a mismatch in how leadership inconsistency is experienced—a quiet case of Execution Drift—where leadership behavior misaligns from cultural expectations. What happened in that conversation wasn’t obvious, but it wasn’t harmless.

You can't expect trust to form evenly if what "good leadership" looks like depends on which supervisor you’re assigned to.

And while AI can help stem drift, as we will see later, there is also the risk that drift will be amplified and accelerated (see BOX below) if these applications are not deployed correctly.

From Customer Experience to Supervisor Experience

In “Tapping the Power of Culture – Part 1” (Contact Center Pipeline, July 2025), Mark Pereira offered a powerful reminder: cultural intelligence [cultural quotient] (CQ) is the difference between connection and confusion.

His article walked us through real-world agent interactions where culture reshaped the outcome of a call. The same principle applies to the employee experience.

The moment a supervisor delivers feedback, runs a huddle, or escalates an issue, they are not just executing a task. They’re impacting the employee experience and company culture.

And in a world of remote, diverse, and high-pressure teams, leading with CQ consistently is not an entry-level skill. It’s an advanced one: and it requires a system, not just hope and memory.

You can’t expect trust to form evenly if what “good leadership” looks like depends on which supervisor you’re assigned to. This is where most organizations unintentionally fall short, because until now, they’ve never had a way to make consistency stick.

That’s the purpose of an Execution System. When CQ doesn’t consistently show up in how supervisors lead, it’s not just a missed opportunity: it’s evidence of drift.

Drift Isn’t a Style Problem. It’s a System Problem.

When leaders are inconsistent, it’s easy to blame “style” or “personality.” We say, “She’s a natural communicator” or “That team just clicks.”

But the reality is more troubling: the leadership behind those outcomes comes from outdated methods, habits, and tribal knowledge.

Every supervisor interprets expectations differently based on their past experiences:

• One leads how a previous boss taught them.
• Another leads by memory and principles.
• A third leads by instinct.

None are trying to negatively impact the employee experience, but that’s exactly what happens because of the inconsistency.

Most contact centers try to solve this with training or coaching, believing, “If we just train them better, our supervisors will lead the way we expect.”

What looks like “style” is often just variation with consequences. A coaching conversation on one team feels empowering. The same coaching on another feels punitive. One supervisor follows up on engagement surveys. Another dismisses them as corporate noise.

And because this variation is rarely visible in a dashboard, it gets normalized. If the experience of being coached, supported, or corrected depends on who your supervisor is, you’re not scaling leadership. Instead, you’re scaling variation. That’s supervisor drift: and it’s silently shaping your retention, engagement, and performance.

Why Training and Coaching Aren’t Enough

Most contact centers try to solve this with training or coaching, believing, “If we just train them better, our supervisors will lead the way we expect.” But drift proves otherwise. It happens with new and tenured leaders alike.

New supervisors drift because they’re undersupported. They complete training, but in the heat of the day, they fall back on:

• What they think their manager wants.
• What they saw another supervisor do.
• What worked when they were an agent.
• Whatever gets them through the next shift.

It’s not that they have forgotten their training; it’s that there’s no system to guide them.

Tenured supervisors drift for the opposite reason: they’re habitual. They’ve been through multiple training programs and shifting priorities, so they fall back on what feels familiar and psychologically safe:

• The routines they learned from a favorite boss.
• What worked last quarter.
• What they’ve seen over time on how to stay out of trouble.

Without reinforcement, even high-performing supervisors start leading based on memory and habit—not aligned with current expectations. Coaching helps, but it’s often too late and too inconsistent, reinforcing their way of leading, not your way.

If your supervisors are still inconsistent after being trained and coached, don’t ask, “What else do they need to learn?” Ask, “What are we doing to guide and reinforce the right leadership behaviors every day?”

The FONE Factors: Hidden Forces Behind Supervisor Drift

If supervisors are still inconsistent after training, you have an execution problem, not a knowledge or competency problem.

Without reinforcement systems, leadership behaviors don’t stick. This is because your supervisors are human, and no one is immune from the “FONE Factors.” These are the four internal forces behind supervisor drift, causing leaders to stray from your expectations even when they think they’re leading the right way.

• F – Fear: Fear of doing the wrong thing, of being blamed, or of standing out. This causes supervisors to play it safe, leading cautiously and defaulting to the safest—not always the best—interpretation of rules.
• O – Overconfidence: The belief that they’re right, which blinds them to new guidance. They dismiss new training, thinking, “I already know this,” even when their knowledge is outdated or misaligned.
• N – Negative Impressions: Supervisors worry more about looking competent than being competent. They mask uncertainty and avoid asking for clarity, doubling down on flawed approaches to appear sharp.
• E – Execution Blindness: Senior leaders can see the metrics but can’t explain why performance swings wildly between teams, or how supervisors are quietly shaping culture.

These factors are genuinely human and must be recognized because they make leadership behavior inconsistent. It creates a performance pattern that impacts every metric on your dashboards and fuels anxiety.

Drift as Cancer: How Leadership Breakdown Progresses

Most leaders think performance fails suddenly. It doesn’t. It spreads quietly, invisibly, cell by cell (see CHART 1). Supervisor drift is like a progressive disease. It starts before symptoms appear, and by the time metrics reflect the damage, it’s already systemic.

This isn’t a style issue; it’s a progressive breakdown of execution. It progresses in stages:

• Localized Drift: FONE factors influence isolated behaviors under pressure. Small style deviations and inconsistencies appear.
• Reinforced Drift: Habits become normalized. Morale gaps between teams and increased escalations emerge.
• Organizational Spread: Drift spreads supervisor-to-supervisor. Performance variation and engagement dips become widespread.
• Cultural Mutation: FONE becomes the dominant leadership pattern. Toxic subcultures form and churn surges. Recovery becomes urgent and expensive.

This model reframes how to think about supervisor behavior and skills. Instead of blaming the individual, we must ask: “What’s weakening our immune system? What’s allowing FONE to spread unchecked?” You can’t fix Stage III or IV Drift with another training session. You need a systemic solution.

The FONE Diagnostic: See What the Data Doesn’t Show

If drift is quietly spreading through your leadership ranks, dashboards won’t show it. Coaching forms won’t capture it. And performance metrics are the last place it reveals itself.

That’s why we need the FONE Diagnostic, to see what the data doesn’t show. This isn’t a philosophical exercise; it’s a fast, operational tool that helps you surface the impact of the FONE Factors in your center.

This is a sample from the 10-question FONE Diagnostic:

• We’ve trained our supervisors, but we still see major differences in how they handle common issues with their team members.
• We’re rolling out AI tools to support supervisors, but haven’t embedded our culture, expectations, policies, or procedures into the AI.
• Across teams, employee engagement is inconsistent and varied.
• When reviewing reports on team performance, I often find it difficult to explain why there is a variance from one team to another.

By simply answering “Yes,” “No,” or “I don’t know” to these and other questions, you can get a FONE Score with a clear picture of how significant your execution gaps truly are. This diagnostic is the first step in the journey from theory to execution.

How Execution Systems Lock in Leadership Behavior

If drift is the disease, an execution system is the treatment. A true execution system is a purpose-built infrastructure that anchors your leadership expectations, reinforces them daily, and makes it easy for supervisors to do the right thing every time.

That’s why more senior operations leaders are seeking to implement Leadership Execution-as-a-Service (LEaaS) (see CHART 2). LEaaS replaces traditional contact center leadership training with a system that drives consistent supervisor behavior every day. It installs a leadership execution system built around your culture, expectations, and frontline realities.

The key tool in LEaaS is culture-calibrated AI. This application utilizes AI software trained on your organization’s standards, policies, and practices, guiding and reinforcing supervisors to lead as you intend and reducing Drift across teams and centers.

Critically, LEaaS is built with your teams, not just for them, so that adoption sticks and supervisor routines reflect the way you want them to lead. It doesn’t deliver information. It delivers execution. With custom apps, culture-calibrated AI, and real-time reinforcement, LEaaS makes leadership more aligned, consistent, and scalable.

Before 2024, this wasn’t possible. Most centers relied on a “patch and nudge” approach, hoping that training and coaching would stick. But hope isn’t a strategy, and memory isn’t a system. The result? Leadership behavior keeps drifting.

What makes an execution system different?

• Embedded: It lives inside workflows, not in a binder.
• Reinforcing: It nudges and guides behavior in real time.
• Culture-calibrated: It reflects your specific expectations and decision standards.
• AI-powered, human-centered: It scales consistency without erasing judgment.

An execution system creates healthy habits, not just more information. It means your AI delivers your response, not a general one. It means coaching is aligned, not opinion-based. It means leadership is no longer invisible. Most importantly, it means your culture scales.

We are in a new era: the Execution Era. This goes beyond leadership training by shaping how supervisors lead. It anchors cultural intelligence, aligns AI, and locks in the behaviors your contact center actually needs. It gives you a fighting chance in the battle Drift was quietly winning.

Culture Doesn’t Scale Itself, But Drift Does

Mark Pereira was right: cultural intelligence is the center of trust and clarity. Aaron Painter (see BOX) was right, too: AI doesn’t have built-in values; it scales whatever is there.

And our central truth is this: drift is behavioral inconsistency, and the only way to stop it is with an execution system that embeds and protects your culture.

Let’s be realistic: the contact center’s stressors aren’t going away. They’re increasing and mutating.

The modern contact center is a pressure system, and every friction point—conflicting priorities, role confusion, lack of visibility—acts like an oxidizer, feeding a chain reaction. Drift is what gives those stressors a superhighway.

You need more than hope and inspirational training. You need a robust immune system. Resilient cultures don’t happen automatically; they require visible behavior patterns reinforced daily through design, not charisma.

Leadership execution systems (LEaaS) are the future. They don’t just inspire behavior; they build it. They don’t replace judgment; they guide it. They don’t scale drift; they stop it.

Are you reinforcing the culture you want? Or are you slowly drifting into one you didn’t choose? You don’t have to guess. Get proactive, because culture doesn’t scale itself. But drift does.