Fast Lane
Power to the people
How to empower employees to make decision — even if you don't agree with them
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Chicago | January 2009
Page 1 of 2
Deb Leon, founder and president, Health Contact Partners Inc.
Deb Leon wants her
employees to be empowered, and that means they can make decisions that
she doesn’t agree with.
For example, the president
and founder of Health Contact
Partners Inc. recalls a time
when she and an employee
disagreed. So instead of continuing the argument, they
decided talk again the next
day — and Leon came to a
realization.
“I realized that the decision
we were making — the ability for that person to make
this decision was more
important than the decision
itself,” she says. “That’s what
actually turned the corner
for me.”
Smart Business spoke with
Leon — whose health call
center employs 100 people —
about how empowering
employees can help you better fulfill your customers’
needs.
Q. How do you determine
what customer needs your
company can fulfill?
It’s twofold. No. 1 is establishing need. There’s a need
for all sorts of things. Our
clients probably have a laundry list of things that they
could use from us.
Secondly, is it something
we can deliver very, very
well? Is it in our short grasp?
If it’s not in our short grasp
and we want to take a look
at something, we then have
to weigh the advantage and
the cost of putting our
resources over on something
that’s too far out of our
grasp. We go through that
exercise of saying, ‘All right,here’s the resources that it’s
going to take’ — planning it
out down the road for product development, program
development, marketing.
You start bringing [in] the
IT [department], all those
pieces that have to support
that, and start looking at
this from a research standpoint. Are we willing to
invest in the resources that
it’s going to take while not
pulling off from our current
business?
And that’s that balance.
There is this fine line
between balancing
your current book of
business and the products and services you
offer and making sure
you are delivering at a
high-quality level that
keeps you ahead of
your competition.
What we found to be
most effective is
there’s always another
circle beyond where
we are at that is within our grasp, and it’s a
bit of a stretch, but it’s
not a mega stretch.
Every time that we’ve
mega-stretched, even
if it’s successful, there
has been collateral
damage to the rest of the
business.
So, we’ve learned a lesson
for us about that, about saying, ‘All right, this is going
to have to be in either our
primary circle or the next
ring out.’
