Insomnia: October 2004

Community Comments

How Can I Let Her Go?

By Georgene Waterman

Question: I am the owner of an insurance company headquartered in Sacramento. I started the company with one employee in 1995. She is still with me today. At the beginning, we did all the jobs in the company – everything that had to be done to grow the company to the size it is today. Now I have 75 employees, $15 million in revenue and serve all of California's commercial insurance needs for small to medium-size businesses. Two years ago we started a personal-lines division, which is growing 50 percent annually. And now, what keeps me up at night:
     As the company grew, my first employee took on more and more responsibilities. We hired more employees and she ran the office, paid the bills and provided the customer service while I sold the policies and serviced the customers in the field. I worked long hours, she worked long hours and the company prospered. It was not until I started to hire other management-level employees that I noticed that she did not have the abilities or even thinking processes of the new managers. As more managers have come on board it is evident that she no longer belongs at the senior-management level in the company.
     I need to take some action but I am not quite sure what to do. I have lost too many nights of sleep over this one and need some help. How can I let her go? She was instrumental in helping the company grow to where it is today. I think she will see any kind of demotion as unacceptable for all her hard work and years of devotion that she has contributed to my company. I have always continued to raise her salary to show my appreciation and now she is one of the highest paid employees. She remains my most loyal employee.

Shut-Eye Reply: Your problem is a common one and has several steps to a successful resolution for all concerned. First, when we start a business we don't do much strategic planning. We really don't think about our company's mission, the guiding principles/values that we will use as a guideline to make our business decisions, or where we are going or how we should get there. We just set up shop with one or two people to help us on our way to what we hope will be success. You were lucky. On your first try you got what most business owners today hope for: a loyal, dedicated, hard-working employee. As a contemporary leader, one of your roles is choosing the right people for your company. In his latestbook, "Good to Great," Jim Collins calls this skill "choosing the right people for your bus." But choosing the right people is not the only part of that skill that you need to be able to implement. It is equally important that you choose the right job for that person. Collins calls this "the right seat on the bus."
     Whose fault is it if you have the wrong person in the wrong seat on your bus? Yours. What you need to do is get her in the right seat. Each employee comes to your business with talents, knowledge and skills. Talent is innate; you cannot teach anyone talent. Yet it is this very talent that is most important when we make sure we have placed the employee in the right job. The Gallup Organization, a global management consulting firm, summarized more than 30 years of surveys in quests of finding out why some managers were so much better than others. In its book, "Now Discover Your Strengths," Gallup developed a tool to help assess the innate talents of employees. The study proved that an employee who has the innate talents and has been given knowledge and developed skills for a particular job can produce 1.8 times the work of an employee who does not have the innate talent.
Continued...

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