What Are You Hungry For?

I started my professional career in Cape Town, selling advertising space in a call centre. I was a struggling actor, which is a polite way of saying unemployed, and I needed to make ends meet.

It was a harsh environment. Our job was to phone marketing managers and push them until they bought space. Management wanted us hungry. Hungry for the money, hungry for the sale, and hungry for the bell that rang across the floor so the whole call centre knew you'd closed a deal.

They gave us scripts. They gave us targets. They gave us a leaderboard.

When my numbers dipped, they took away my chair. I stood at my desk until I made a sale.

Nobody ever asked me what I was hungry for.

Hungry for what?

Eric Berne, the psychiatrist who founded Transactional Analysis, argued that people carry psychological hungers as real as the need for food. He described six. Three are physical. The other three walk into work with us every day:

• Structure: knowing what's expected of me, and how my time will be filled.
• Recognition: being seen by someone who matters.
• Stimulus: being engaged, rather than treated as a replaceable resource.

When those hungers go unfed, people don't stop being hungry. They find something else to eat.

In an organisation, that usually shows up as toxicity. Gossip. Drama. People going through the motions. And a customer on the phone who gets a tediously robotic script and nothing else.

Most customer experience training goes straight for the behaviour. Agents are told to put a smile in their voice and use the customer's name (three times). None of that is wrong, but it can be vapid.

In over a decade of working in call centres, as an agent and as the person brought in to train them, I've watched it fail to stick. It isn't that the training is bad. It starts in the wrong place. The behaviour was never the problem. The hunger underneath it was.

Structure

When managers hear the word structure, they reach for more rules. More process. Another dashboard. That isn't what people are hungry for.

Berne meant something simpler. We need to know how our time will be filled, and not knowing is genuinely uncomfortable. Leave a team without structure and they will build their own. You may not like what they build.

A call centre looks full of structure. Shift times, call volumes, average handling time. But you can schedule someone's day to the minute and still leave them completely unanchored. They know what they're doing. They have no idea why it matters, or where it's going.

The structure people need isn't control. It's clarity: what's expected of me, how I'll know I'm doing well, and what happens next. A leader who gives that doesn't need to micromanage. A leader who doesn't will end up micromanaging anyway.

Recognition

Berne called the units of recognition strokes. A stroke is anything that says "I see you". A nod. A thank you. A manager who knows your name. Even criticism counts, and that's the part leaders miss.

People need strokes so badly that, if they can't get positive ones, they'll settle for negative ones. A negative stroke still proves you exist. Being ignored is worse than being told off.

So when someone keeps arriving late, pushing boundaries or picking fights in the team chat, there's a harder question than "how do I stop this?" When last did this person get noticed for doing something right?

The bell in that Cape Town call centre was a stroke. So was losing my chair. The system knew exactly how to recognise us. It just only ever recognised one thing.

The customer on the other end of the line carries the same hunger. They don't only want their problem solved. They want to feel that someone noticed them while it was being solved.

You can't give customers recognition you're not receiving yourself.

Stimulus

We need input. Variety. Something that engages the mind. Take it away and people start generating their own.

Think about what that means for an agent on their sixtieth call of the day, reading from the same script. The work has stopped feeding them, so they look elsewhere: their phone, the drama two desks over, the minutes left until the next break.

Or they go numb. And numb is exactly what your customer hears on the line.

We call this an engagement problem and answer it with a fun day, a team-building event or a motivational speaker. None of those feed the hunger for long.

Stimulus isn't entertainment. It's being asked to think. Being trusted with a real problem. Learning something that makes tomorrow's call different from today's.

Starting in the right place

This month I stood in front of a room of around 100 call centre agents and team leaders and talked to them about being hungry. Not for the sale. Psychologically hungry.

What would have made me better at that Cape Town job wasn't more pressure. It was clarity about what good looked like, someone noticing when I got it right, and work that asked more of me than reading a script. Feed those hungers and nobody needs to take your chair away.

Structure. Recognition. Stimulus. Feed those three and you won't need to train people to sound engaged.

They will be.

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The three hungers are one of the ideas at the heart of my book, Thriving Culture. It draws on Transactional Analysis, the Enneagram and other models to help leaders and teams change what happens at the level of psychology, not just behaviour. Get the book here.