by Pam Butterfield
March 2006
Businesses that want to succeed in the current business environment of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations will need to nurture their people, even as they face the need for deep cuts in their workforces. No matter what companies manufacture or sell, they will need to realize that changes in their workforce could severely impact their competitive advantages.
Here are seven trends that insurance executives or agency managers need to keep in mind in the face of upcoming employment instability:
Look Out For the Talent Glut
There will be an excess of insurance executives looking for work. There is going to be a lot of "talent" looking for employment. Remember that not all of them will be right for your organization. Just because they have insurance and product knowledge doesn’t mean you should hire them. Agencies need to look for employees who are a cultural match for their organizations, those who are comfortable in a sales environment and those who will ultimately make their agencies more productive.
Avoid any well-intentioned urge to hire an unemployed friend or family member out of the goodness of your heart if that person does not have the qualifications necessary to contribute to your agency’s success. Creating an environment that will support success means hiring people who are going to keep your agency on the competitive edge for future success.
Help Those Left Behind
Remember to tend to the needs of the people who are left behind after a layoff. Successful leaders will be responsible for the job of healing those left behind after layoffs and helping them focus strategically on what needs to be done to move forward.
Also, if your home office has downsized, expect that those remaining will be focused on themselves, fueled by the loss of their peers and the fear of what’s gong to happen to them personally. Hopefully, the managers in the home office have a change-management process in place that helps people prepare before, during and after layoffs.
Put the Right People on the Bus, Especially if Your Agency is Small
Smaller agencies will do more with less if they have the right people on the bus and sitting in the right seats. Small agencies, especially, will have to learn how to develop leaders from within and groom internal talent in order to grow. They will need to learn how to tap into people’s individual strengths and talents if they want to be competitive with less overhead and get a larger piece of the pie.
Another mark of tomorrow’s successful agency will be the ability to nurture employees’ "right brains," where creativity resides, because the repetitive rote tasks will continue to be automated or outsourced. Hiring the talent that’s creative and innovative will require some skill. During the hiring process, companies and agencies will need to weed out candidates whose attitudes tell them they haven’t learned anything new in a while. These are the kind of candidates who won’t contribute to a creative workplace. Smaller agencies need to look for lifetime learners who will further the goals of smarter-working companies.
Attract and Keep Employees with Quality-of-Life Benefits
The war for good talent is going to intensify. Agencies are going to have to find additional ways to attract and retain the best talent. Good benefits are not always about the dollars. Quality of life is a huge issue, especially for Generation X. Look for creative options for pensions and health insurance. If the economics of these benefits limit your ability to offer them, find alternative benefits that address employees’ needs to improve their quality of life.
Quality-of-life benefits help people improve and better manage their own lives. These might include helping employees learn new things that interest them and make better choices about retirement. Agencies can offer courses that teach employees how to deal with change, how to make better money decisions, how to deal with retirement, even how to figure out what their next careers will be (especially valuable in today’s environment, where the promise of lifetime employment is a thing of the past).
Develop Leaders Who Can Simultaneously Maintain Stability and Promote Change
Twenty years ago, leaders didn’t need to cultivate their ability to deal with change. Leaders promoted stability and kept up with market demand. Their jobs were to keep everything comfortable. Today, leaders have to keep up with both. They need to foster stability to get and close sales today while promoting the changes necessary to support the agency’s viability in the future.
Become a Coach-Like Leader
There will be an increased need for people in leadership positions to be coach-like. Coaches don’t throw the ball themselves. They work with others to help do it better than they ever thought they could. Coach-like leaders encourage their ‘players’ to be adaptable, flexible and creative in how they are doing their work.
Coach-like leaders work at building winning teams. They know that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to bringing out the best in individual team members. Watch a good coach, like Geno Auriemma of the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team. He’ll scream at one player to bring out her best; with others, he’ll talk with them quietly. Coach-like leaders have an adaptable, flexible way of working with each person to prepare them to do their best.
Today’s leaders have to be agile so they can coach a variety of people. And, like any good coach, they have to be open to learn from their employees. Those who think, "This employee is 22-years-old and fresh out of school, so what could she possibly teach me?" won’t last long in the contemporary business environment. These leaders won’t be open to the variety of experiences and different kinds of people they’ll need to succeed in the 2006 (and beyond) workplace.
Cultivate Your Own Ability to Remain Employable
Unlike past generations where workers could expect to remain employed just because they worked for large companies, this generation will learn that they can’t rely on those institutions for lifelong jobs. Even an agency where they create a family-like environment and stress two-way loyalty won’t be able to avoid laying off people.
Those who face these realities will take responsibility for managing their own careers. They must learn to identify their own strengths, talents and transferable skills. Successful careers will be built when people learn to be portable and adaptable. The future will mean a lot of job changes. These might be lateral moves or even stepping backwards to learn a new career. Those with the egos that say to themselves, "I’m not going back and become the novice and have to learn a new career from scratch," won’t be able to adapt to this environment. The whole idea of remaining employable - not just employed - is going to become a lifetime skill. It will require that people in one industry extend their skills and knowledge to be able to move into other lines of work if it becomes necessary. In other words, think outside insurance.
Only a small percentage of people will get this. A lot of people will continue to be so sucked into the day-to-day that they either don’t have the time or the interest to pick their heads up and take action before they get to be unemployable.
In general, we expect the trends that shape business to revolve around one word: change. Change will be the only constant in the workplace for long time to come. Those who develop the necessary leadership styles and adaptability will enjoy the rollercoaster ride provided to businesses today and tomorrow.
Pam Butterfield offers organizations the resources they need to energize business growth and improve profits. She works with business owners, CEOs and organizational leaders to identify and eliminate barriers to performance, resolve company obstacles, teach coaching techniques that spark individual performance and development, and improve the way their teams work together and make decisions. Pam’s website is www.BusinessSuccessTools.Biz and she can be reached at 860-643-4744.
© 2005 National Association of Health Underwriters. All rights reserved.
