Wholesale Brokers Confront People Challenges

Placing employees in the right positions not only makes for a happier and more productive staff but can also provide a boost to the employer, noted Herbert M. Greenberg and Patrick Sweeney, from Caliper. The Princeton, N.J.-based consulting firm has more than 40 years experience assessing the sales, service and management potential of firms throughout the United States and the world with its profile-testing program.

Mr. Greenberg, founder, president and chief executive officer, and Mr. Sweeney, an executive vice president, discussed their new book, "How to Hire & Develop Your Next Top PerformerThe Five Qualities That Make Salespeople Great," detailing some of what they have learned over the years.

One major point was job matching. Fitting the person to the correct job pays off in lower turnover and more employee production. But their message had less to do with job placement than finding the right personality. "What is in the heart and in the head, that is what matters," observed Mr. Sweeney.

"It is not enough that a person can sell. You need to look at the job match," noted Mr. Greenberg. "Whether it is in wholesale, retail, service, each requires different capabilities."

In Caliper's work with sports, through testing they found that despite an athlete's ability, athletes who were placed in positions that matched their personalities were more successful than those who lacked the fortitude to accept failure and continue.

For example, Mr. Greenberg said, a minor league baseball player comes into the league hitting .400 and falls into an inevitable slump. He cant deal with the failure and is eventually forgotten because he fails to continue to perform. The real star is the one who recognizes failure within the role he plays, accepts it, learns, and overcomes it. This is something, he noted, every salesperson faces throughout his or her career.

"If it can work in sports, it can certainly work in business," said Mr. Greenberg.

In hiring, they noted, experience should not be the prime consideration. "What do you look for?" Mr. Sweeney challenged the audience. "Most often you look for experience first. The price can be high for taking that road. Hiring has less to do with experience than with potential."

"We should not care about what you have done," noted Mr. Greenberg, "We should care about who you are."

While placing employees in the right position is one dynamic to create an effective sales force, creating an environment where people feel productive and appreciated is a challenge for every manager and business owner.

Emily Huling, founder of the consulting firm Selling Strategies Inc. in Terrell, N.C., offered the wholesale brokers a few tips on what they should do to be better managers and to design stronger working environments, offering a few nuggets of advice detailed in her book, "Selling From The Inside."

"Be a role model for everything," she told managers. "Everything you think and do, you are copied for good or bad."

"Perception is reality," she declared. "Hear what your employees are saying about your organization."

"Create trust and don't undermine it," she noted, adding. "You need to develop principles about your organization and develop people to be the best they can be."

Among some of the practical ideas she gave managers was to review their mission statements and handbooks. She said sales organizations take such documents from other places but fail to review or update them. In some cases the volumes may be wholly inadequate to the size and nature of their business.

Managers need to create an environment of trust and growth. Undermining someone's authority or not recognizing them for their achievements defeats the effort to grow the organization. "Manage like you need your employees more than they need you," she advised.

Ms. Huling also noted that employees need a challenge. "You motivate [employees] with challenging work," she remarked, "but more work is not challenging work."

"Let people know you have their best interest in mind," she added.

On the flip side of the employee relationship, two attorneys with Jackson/Lewis, a national labor and employment law firm, advised the audience of the liability that owners and managers face when they deal with bad employees they should not have hired to begin with.

"The biggest exposure you face outside of [errors and omissions] is your employees," noted Paul J. Siegel, with the firm in Melville, N.Y.

"Employment law has nothing to do with law," said Michael J. Lotito, with the firms San Francisco office. "It has to do with money and emotion. If a person perceives that they have not been treated properly, you have a risk."

A "bad" employee is someone you want to assist to get to their next job, Mr. Siegel noted. One sign of a "bad" employee is that the person constantly complains, he said, warning that this is usually the person who will be the first to sue.

He advised that when hiring, managers should add people with good attitudes, who want to work and do not have large gaps in their employment records or change jobs often "unless they are your kids and you have to."

"No one leaves for a better opportunity and still makes the same money," he observed.

Check references and be sure the person is someone you want to work with, he advised.

New hires should also be given an introduction or orientation period, because managers often realize quickly if they made a hiring mistake. This period gives them an opportunity to fire the worker and reduce the context for an accusation of discrimination to hang over the firing.

However, noted Mr. Siegel, any reference, joke or comment about age, sex or race opens the door to a discrimination suiteven if the remarks were made in jestand can end up in a legal proceeding.

"People must think before they talk," he said.

"The bottom line is inconsistent treatment," Mr. Siegel added. "If all your actions are the same, and you do not discriminate, then there is no discrimination. Dont create those situations."

One growing area of concern owners and managers need to be aware of is the need to provide continuing education for employees, Mr. Lotito informed the group. California, Connecticut and Maine have established laws that make it the employer's responsibility to train employees properly to deal with workplace issues, he noted. Failure to do so can result in a suit by an employee who feels he or she was not treated fairly because the manager lacked training to deal with workplace issues.

"This is a big deal," said Mr. Lotito.

The major question brokerage owners face, he said, is what are they prepared to do to minimize their risk? While employment practices liability insurance may be one answer, that only will come into play after the fact.

"The real question is how do you make sure these suits are not filed in the first place," he concluded.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, February 25, 2005. Copyright 2005 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.