What Every WFM Leader Needs to Know

Many WFM leaders get promoted because they’re excellent at the work itself: forecasting, scheduling reporting. But too often, we stay there, doing the tactical work that got us noticed in the first place. The trap is real, and it’s powerful because WFM is so deeply rooted in numbers and process that it feels natural to keep focusing on them. But the truth is simple: the skills that got you to a WFM leadership role won’t keep you successful in it. Leadership in WFM requires pivoting to focus on people; not just metrics.

Why this shift feels harder in WFM

Every part of WFM is built on data, service levels, forecasts, occupancy, shrinkage. It becomes easy to forget that each data point represents real people: agents who miss family events because of a bad schedule; customers who wait longer than they should because of poor forecasting. It’s tempting to stay in the comfort of the spreadsheets and processes, and the industry itself often rewards that mindset. Sometimes WFM leaders stay in these roles not because they care deeply about people, but because they’re exceptional with numbers, and their own leadership undervalues the human side, too.

But if we stay there, we risk missing the actual purpose of WFM: balancing customer needs, business needs and agent needs. And balancing those needs starts with the people who do the work every day, our team.

What leadership really looks like

One of the hardest challenges I’ve faced is figuring out how much to push someone toward a goal I see for them, and how much to let them set their own path.

How do you balance the value of being pushed by your leader versus the value of owning your own success?

Here’s my rule: If it’s about their current role or the next logical career step, I set clear expectations, hold them accountable and help them build the needed skills. But if it’s beyond that, like pivoting to marketing or IT, that’s their goal to own. My role with their goals becomes supportive, offering connections, advice, and occasional check-ins, but letting them take charge. This simple distinction has clarified for myself and my team what my role as their leader is.

A practical example: When I wanted an analyst to eventually own forecasting, we started by doing it together. I explained why I made certain decisions and how I thought about risk. I brought her into the meetings where we discussed the forecast and she saw the process from start to finish.

Eventually, she built forecasts while I still presented them and covered the questions, giving her a taste of the process, but clearly still owning it myself. Later, she presented parts of her forecast to the team, and finally, she fully owned the process: defending assumptions, answering questions and becoming the face of forecasting to the organization. This didn’t happen overnight; it took six to nine months. But it positioned her as a leader of the forecasting process, laying the foundation with leadership to consider her for future projects and promotions.

Creating the space and time for this investment isn’t easy, especially since the fires never stop in contact centers. What helped me was treating one-on-ones as a top priority. When they know your plate is overflowing and you still make time for them, it sends a clear signal that people are a priority to you, and more importantly, they are a priority.

The tension of stepping back

There’s always a temptation to jump back into tactical work. And sometimes, it really is the right move: if your team doesn’t yet have the skills to fix an urgent issue with serious consequences, stepping in can help. But it can’t be your default. Every time you do, you risk signaling to your team and your peers that you don’t trust your managers or analysts to handle it, and you can undermine their authority in the process.

Not everything needs to be done perfectly either. Some tasks truly are pass/fail, like payroll or client billing errors that can’t be tolerated. But others can have a passing grade, maybe a forecast lands at 85% accuracy instead of 90%. That creates room for your team to try, learn and improve without fear. Leaders who expect everything to be done exactly as they’d do it miss the point and miss the growth opportunity for their teams.

The real work of WFM leadership

It took me years to realize that what makes you successful as an IC, speed, accuracy, volume, doesn’t translate to leadership. Leadership impact shows up in the confidence, growth and capability of your team. Filling your calendar with meetings might feel important, but what matters is whether you’re investing your time in people.

WFM leadership isn’t about being the best at building schedules or forecasting demand. It’s about building the people who can do those things, and often better than you could. It means stepping back from the work, stepping into the tension and remembering that behind every number are real people whose lives your decisions affect.

Your real job isn’t the work itself. It’s creating an environment where your team can thrive, grow and carry the work forward better than you ever could.