- You know this disconnect is hurting your insurance company’s performance”

As a CEO, SVP, Board Member or member of the Senior Management Team, you have a clear vision of how you want to take your insurance company forward.

You are clear in your mind about what the future looks like, and what you need to do to reach your goals.

Your direct reports will understand your vision and perhaps even a level below them as well.

But what about the rest of your employees?

The very people who are doing the day-to-day work? The very people who are interacting daily with your customers. or developing your products and services?

In many insurance companies — even those which are highly successful and profitable — there is a gap between the vision which is held at the senior management level, and what is understood and believed in the wider workforce.

You may recognise this gap in your insurance company too. This ‘disconnect’ can be a major barrier to achieving your company’s goals.

Example 1 – The Story of Tom and MidSizeCo:

Tom is the CEO of MidSizeCo, a mid size insurance company, employing 400 people nationally. The company is a specialist in providing health insurance to consumers and businesses. It sells its insurance products direct through the phone, web and a network of agents.

Tom and his fellow VPs have a clear vision of where they want to take the company, but they know that the rest of the workforce doesn’t fully understand, believe in and emotionally connect with the vision.

This disconnect between the Boardroom and workforce is hurting the company, as the message employees give customers and prospects does not reconcile with the message the senior management team want customers and prospects to receive.

Solution:

By using Enterprise LEADER as a vehicle for change, the senior management team of MidSizeCo (supported by middle management) are able to explain to employees the vision, purpose and goals of the insurance company and create alignment between the boardroom and workforce.

Through the mentoring materials featured in Enterprise LEADER and the group face-to-face mentoring sessions, employees get to hear in depth the goals and vision of the senior management team, and also have a forum and framework to share their ideas and concerns back to management.

Simon explains how Apple set themselves apart by having a ‘reason why’ which is understood by every employee (and is part of its internal culture).

If you find 18 minutes in your day, watching this will be time well spent.

Although it is clearly not a programme about ‘employee engagement’, it is definitely a programme about ‘people engagement’, and there are many observational lessons you can take away from it.

At the heart of the story is an inspirational leader, Dick Winters, who joined the army as a private, and in 4 years finished the war as a highly regarded and respected major, who led his troops through the most difficult and unimaginably horrifying times of war.

Lesson 1: Having a great leader at the top is critical to achieving extraordinary results

The first ‘engagement’ lesson to take away from Band of Brothers is the importance of having a strong leader at the top of the organization, who people respect, look up to and admire.

Major Winters was that person in Easy Company.

Winters was the classic ‘follow-me’ inspirational leader: fair, caring, brave, and always leading by example. He always gave to his soldiers, and never took. This ‘give not take’ belief was one of his principal philosophies of his leadership.

His success was not only due to his calm head and thinking under immense pressure, but also his brilliant people management skills, and his ability to connect with the hearts and minds of his team. This included his fellow officers (both junior and senior to him), and more importantly, his NCOs and soldiers who laid down their lives for their country.

Lesson 2: Middle and line-managers (NCOs) drive results – as well as engagement

It is impossible to watch Band of Brothers without understanding the importance of non-commissioned officers (NCOs) such as sergeants and corporals.

In a traditional business, NCOs are the equivalent of middle-managers or line-managers, who are the people with the closest contact to the front-line employees – and the glue which keeps the teams together.

In one particular episode, Major Dick Winters says that the only thing holding Easy Company together are the NCOs. In a subsequent book written by Winters (which I have just received from amazon), he states, “The heart of the company, as always, was the corps of seasoned noncoms.” In the military, NCOs are critical in giving advice, feedback and guidance to officers. Senior leaders such as Winters invest time in developing and mentoring the man-management ability of these NonComs, who in turn understand the importance of providing care and support for the men the lead.

Lesson 3: Every member of the team must believe and understand the company’s purpose

Next you have the soldiers themselves who believed in the purpose and cause they were fighting for, which was democracy, freedom and the elimination of Hitler’s fascism. Even though they were thrown together in the most stressful situations, they were able to achieve extraordinary results because of the bond, focus on a common purpose and team spirit they had.

Their success was against all odds and in the most challenging situations.

There have been endless books analyzing the military and business. I’m not for one minute suggesting the rhetoric that business is war, but I am simply suggesting that there are many lessons for employee engagement in Band of Brothers.

Under the leadership of Major Dick Winters, his trusted NCOs (the middle and line-managers) and troop soldiers were engaged, understood the goals and purpose of the mission, understood their role in it, passionately believed in what they were doing, and ultimately succeeded.

Lesson 4: Poor leaders destroy morale and confidence

Where Band of Brothers shows instances of exemplary leadership and man-management, there is one episode that shows what a disengaging impact a poor leader or manager can have.

As the troops reached Bastonge, for one of the most hostile battles they faced after D-Day, Easy Company came under the command of Lieutenant Norman Dike, who did not have the respect and belief of Easy Company.

Dike may have had the rank, but he didn’t connect with his men or demonstrate that he cared. Consequently, under his leadership, the troops of E-Company were at their lowest ebb at a difficult time when they needed a strong leader.

Although this time the team looked to their NCOs (in particular Sergent Carwood Lipton who later went on to be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant for his outstanding leadership), the disabling impact that Dike’s poor leadership had on the morale, confidence and the direction of the troops was staggering. In this case, the poor leadership of Dike led to the loss of lives.

Very quickly, once Major Winters saw the problem that Dike’s poor leadership was having in one of the operations in Bastonge, he decisively removed Dike in the battlefield, and installed a new Lieutenant, Ronald Speirs, who took command of the operation.

In business the parallel runs true too.

Poor managers and leaders have a destabilizing impact on the morale, confidence and belief of employees.

Good managers, indeed great managers understand the impact they have on the success of a company or operation.

Great managers are great man-managers – and understand how to get the best from people at a level that few others do. They take responsibility and ownership for the motivation, morale and engagement of their team.

Lesson 5: Training and development is key – as is getting the right people in place, and liberating those who are wrong for the position

The fifth lesson to take away from Band of Brothers, goes back to Episode 1, and the back-story behind Easy Company.

Easy Company was designed to be the best of the best, and a rigorous selection process was undertaken to make sure that only the right men, with the right attitude and aptitude were selected for this crack unit. In many ways, the chances of Easy succeeding where other units may have failed, stems from the fact that they got the right people on the bus in the right seats in the first place, and as we saw in the case of Lieutenant Dike, quickly got the wrong people off the bus. The leadership of Easy understood the importance of playing to people’s strengths.

Much has also been spoken about of Lieutenant Sobel, the original commander of Easy.

Sobel originally trained the men of Easy Company, and was a strict task master, and there can be no doubt that through his training, he created a crack team of elite soldiers.

That said, his leadership approach (ruling by fear), which was the antithesis of Dick Winter’s (leading by example) alienated him from the troops, who did not respect him. So much so that the entire company’s NCOs resigned their commission when Sobel tried to court marshal Winters suggesting that he failed to follow a command, an infraction Sobel falsely manufactured. This is the same as your entire middle-management resigning, because they have lost confidence in your company’s CEO.

In Band of Brothers you see the contrast of leadership styles in Winters, Sobel, Dike and Speirs (who stepped in for Dike on the battlefield). It seems obvious to me that each leader had their time and a place where they could excel.

Sobel was great a training men and instilling a sense of excellence in them. He was not however good at leading troops on the battlefield.

Speirs was awesome on the battlefield, but would arguably not have been as good as Sobel at training men and preparing them for war.

Dike: it’s harder to understand his strengths – perhaps he wasn’t a leader (or hadn’t yet developed as a leader), and should never have been put in that role. This may be very unfair to him, but it is certainly how it is represented in the TV-series and is supported by Winters in his book – ‘Beyond Band of Brothers’.

Winters was an exceptional man-manager of exemplary character who eventually rose to become battalion commander – but who knows, may have been at his best when commanding a company of 150 men, which he did with Easy Company. In many ways, Winters reminds me of Ernest Shackleton, the legendary leader who, after a failed expedition to the North Pole, successfully brought all his crew safely home, against all odds.

Final Thoughts:

It becomes more obvious to me each day as I speak with executives that leadership and man-management is central in creating a company of motivated, engaged employees.

When the question is asked, “How can I motivate or engage my employees?” or “How can I reduce employee turnover?” – the answer which leaps out to me is to develop better leaders and man-managers in your company.

Motivated, driven teams – and strong leaders and man-managers go hand-in-hand.

In Easy Company, Dick Winters may have been the inspirational leader, but he knew only too well that the success of Easy was down to his NCOs and their ability to get the best from the soldiers.

In business, this responsibility falls to front-line-manages, who actually have more impact in creating an engaged workforce than they probably first realise.

In an open letter to the New York Times, Greg Smith, a VP of Goldman Sachs explains why he is resigning.

In his letter, which is incredibly damming, he pulls apart the culture of the bank and believes the values of the senior management are polluting the values of  employees — and having a negative impact on customers.

Take a read…

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TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

(letter pulled from the NYT website).

I learnt quite a few things from meeting them. Most importantly, that I was sending out the wrong marketing message about Enterprise LEADER.

I’ve taken to heart what I learnt there, and have just uploaded a new website with a new marketing message. I hope it is relevant for you, and show’s how Enterprise LEADER can help your company grow.

The direct link is www.enterpriseleaders.com

You’ll know if this new site is relevant to you if you face one or more of these challenges:

1.Your senior management team and employees are not fully aligned .

2. You know your teams could work better together (for the benefit of your customers).

3. You know your employees could be more accountable and take more responsibility.

4. You know your employee’s motivation, morale and engagement could be stronger.

5. You know communication and collaboration could be more free flowing within your company.

6. You know you could provide a more remarkable customer experience.

7. You know you could be more entrepreneurial, innovative, creative and relevant as a company.

The direct link again is www.enterpriseleaders.com.

Sometimes it is easier and more inspirational to write in a different location, rather than being in my own office.

Whilst in Istanbul, I have noticed how entrepreneurial and sales focused the Turkish are. For example, I cannot walk down the street without somebody trying to sell me a carpet, a guidebook, a hat, a bus tour, a meal in a restaurant, and a whole range of other products and services.

A great demonstration of these Turkish entrepreneurs ability to change and meet customers demands, was when it started raining today.

Yesterday the street vendor’s selling focus was on guidebooks, today they are out in force selling umbrellas.

I’m sure if there was a heatwave tomorrow they would switch to selling sunglasses, sun hats and sun tan lotion.

There is a good lesson to be learnt from these Street centres and their rapid ability to adapt and change to the changing needs and wants of their prospective customers.

When I blog, I normally write about how to thrill, WOW and dazzle customers by employees giving customers an exceptional experience.

In this post, I want to share a video when the ‘product’ WOWs customers. But who created the product? Employees!

For companies however, it’s important to know that social media is your customers (happy and unhappy) talking about you… telling their friends – and the world all about you.

Whether customers say good or bad things about you is largely down to the experience they have dealing with your company, it’s products and your employees.

For me, any social media strategy has to include the ‘people’ element – and make sure ALL employees understand their role in shaping a customer’s experience (see slide 70 of the first presentation).

So, what can do you do to make the most of social media?

To start with, simply make sure you WOW your customers so they only have good things to say (tweet!) about you…