by David Wolfskehl

Have you ever wondered why you need to carefully manage certain areas of employees’ performance, while in others they perform wonderfully without much guidance?

Have you ever wondered why people in similar jobs with similar backgrounds will have significantly different work results?

I used to spend time wondering the same things.  Two events changed that.  First, I read a great book called Now, Discover Your Strengths, written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. Second, I asked my employees seemingly simple questions that had huge consequences.  Intuitively I always knew that employees with the same title and in many ways the same skills seemed to mesh with different clients and different types of jobs.  As a leader I tried not to assign work based on who was next up, but who was the right fit.  Whenever I did not match my employees to the correct jobs for their strengths, problems invariably arose.

When we have opportunities to do what we do well, success on many different levels follows.  Almost all of us understand this in a big picture way, but oftentimes we miss the subtle nuances.  You became an actuary because you understood that this was a way to maximize your mathematical and analytical skills within a career that was enjoyable to you.   But then our careers can take us to places that no longer fit our strengths.  We forget that not all types of roles within the large actuarial circle fit our strengths.  We lose sight that not all companies or clients are a match for who we are and what we do well.  The costs of not consistently playing to your strengths are huge.

They include: 

Job dissatisfaction:  How many of us have lost great employees because we had them in the wrong roles?  How many have spent time in their careers dissatisfied because what they were doing or who they were doing it for no longer matched their strengths?  Employees who are not happy are rarely productive and engaged.  In fact, the Gallup Organization estimates that 17 percent of employees are actively disengaged, at a cost of $3,400 per $10,000 in salary.

In today’s tight labor market, can you afford to lose people simply because you never found out what they were unhappy about or why they did not perform at a high level? Especially (as we will see later) when it is often a very simple problem to fix?

Client dissatisfaction: My theme is to simply avoid mismatches.  When you have the wrong work or the wrong clients, things never go smoothly.  Think of it from the client’s perspective: rarely is your client happy when dealing with a company that accepted a mismatch.  These types of client or job mismatches never seem to be as profitable as you thought—and your employees never seem happy to do the work. Your best clients from a point of view of both satisfaction and profitability never come from mismatches. Accepting these mismatches causes the two costs below.

Loss of revenue: Although it seems counterintuitive, accepting revenue from mismatches causes a loss in long-term revenue. It moves resources from what you do best and most profitably to what is in front of you.  These mismatches chew up resources of the organizations, and cause the final cost below.

Lost opportunities: Have you ever been faced with times that you were too busy to really focus on new opportunities—times when you put marketing in a slow mode as you added new people?  Have you ever given a great customer worse service because you were focused on a mismatch that took away too many resources? Profitable opportunities find companies and individuals that show excellence. 

Results

I knew this was working when a customer service representative came into my office, and told me excitedly that she set up an appointment for me to see a potential new client.   She said they were “perfect” for us.  Before that, I would have gotten adjectives such as big, small, nice or mean, but never perfect.  When I met with the client, they WERE perfect.  We spent 90 minutes talking about how we could work together and how to improve the process.  At the end of the meeting I asked how much they were paying.  When they told me, I said I would be more expensive, but would try to come as close as possible.  A week later we were awarded the account.  This account was a “top five” client and in year one produced 8 percent of my revenue.  They were willing to pay a premium for our services because they knew we would bring them value in many other ways.  Nine months later we had a lunch for my team and theirs. We produced 500 custom jobs for the client with a 100 percent “no defect” rate.  We were able to do this without adding any additional staff.  The work was a perfect fit for my firm—the client loved us; the employees loved the client and the work that we produced for them. 

Stay focused on what you do best—clients and employees who are a great fit will find you. 

Not doing what an individual does best has huge costs.  Not maximizing what an organization does best multiplies those costs exponentially.

Not spending time to identify strengths—and weaknesses—and then taking appropriate action is missing a wonderful opportunity.

I always look for the simple solutions that are high impact.

Drum roll please…… now the solutions.

For individuals:

Have a meeting and ask people in similar positions to come prepared with the things they do well (a minimum of three) and some things that they don’t do as well (a minimum of one).

Hint: You already know the answer to these questions.  What they don’t do well is the stuff you need to manage them on.  Their strengths are the tasks that you can give them and know the job will be done well. 

Then, work as a team to figure out ways to eliminate those areas of weakness or shift them to others in the group for whom they are not a weakness.  If you have more than three people doing similar things you will almost always find that a weakness of one person is a strength of another.

For teams:

Make a list of the last 10 jobs that went very well and the last 10 jobs that were headaches.

Look for similarities and root causes of the successes and problems.

Then, clearly define what causes the problems and what makes the winners winners.

Spend your time, effort and marketing dollars on those areas that are winners.

Spend time figuring out how to change those problem areas from losers to winners.  Perhaps you need to add another step in your process, or bring in outside expertise for certain parts of the job. Maybe you need to have the confidence that saying no to losers—even when it means saying no to short-term revenue—is really helping your organization grow.

THESE STRATEGIES ARE SIMPLE

THE RESULTS ARE HUGE

PUT THE IDEAS ON THIS PAGE INTO ACTION

Any questions please feel to e-mail me or call—the Business Advisers International AdviCoach approach is all about turning ideas into actions for organizations.

David Wolfskehl is a regional developer for Business Advisers International. BAI helps clients unlock the power in their organizations. David can be reached at davidw@bai.com. His Web site is www.advicoach.com.