Thomas Cassady’s salesmen don’t need to be loved. They just want some respect.
“The old stereotype of an insurance salesman (that he is) a pat-on-your-back buddy is an anachronism,” says the president and CEO of USI Midwest Cincinnati. “They look for your respect, and they don’t need to be your buddy.”
But in order for any of Cassady’s 105 employees to earn his respect, they have to build up some trust. That requires a constant flow of feedback that goes both ways: top-down as well as bottom-up.
“This is an industry built on trust,” Cassady says. “Are they going to fool us? Shame on us if they do.”
With that sense of accountability, Cassady has spurred revenue from $7 million in 1999 — when the company was created through the merger of his agency with another — to $24.5 million in 2008.
Smart Business spoke with Cassady about building trust and accountability with your employees by offering and receiving feedback.
Offer feedback. The most important thing a leader can do is have the trust of the people who are following. It is sort of like Stephen Covey says: You have to make deposits in the credibility accounts of the people that you rely on. You make those deposits by giving them … honest feedback, whether or not it’s all positive. Good employees want fair, candid feedback. Every employee is looking for specific ways on how they can improve, especially if you can give it to them in a timely fashion — not at the end-of-the-year performance review, even though those are important. A leader that provides instant feedback is much more credible.
We provide a traditional performance review where the supervisor provides written feedback to the employee. In that, we have a forced calibration, which is based on not only what the employee did but how the employee did it and the relative contribution of that job to the overall success of the company.
We have five categories — far surpassed, surpassed, fully achieved, partially achieved and achieved far less. We rank what was achieved as well as how they did it. We don’t want to put somebody in the very top ranking that achieved great things but was a terrorist doing it, so they have to play well in the sandbox as well as achieve superior results.
It’s really whether or not they’re consistent with our company philosophy of how we want people to represent our brand, how they work not just internally but with our carriers and our customers. That would be judged with things like: Do they tell the truth, are they disciplined, do they help others, are they a good inventor, [and] are they a good model for others to follow? They are subjective, and the supervisor probably has the best and the most credibility in those discussions. It’s not what (you are) going to do; it’s what you actually do. It’s just by observing their actions that we are able to do that.
The third — and this is sometimes the most controversial area — is their relative contribution to the overall success of the company. The best way that we have found to try to define relative contribution is how difficult is it for us to go out and replace that person? If it’s relatively easy, then the relative contribution is weaker. If it’s fairly unique and we don’t believe that the person’s skills can be found in the marketplace very well, if at all, then the relative contribution increases dramatically.
The management team and the supervisors get together in a room and talk about everyone and have that open debate on how to rank people.
