Every company fears losing their best staff and insurance brokers have concerns over losing their best and brightest to bigger brokers or perhaps one of the multinational insurance giants.
So what can be done to keep your finest insurance broking employee?
Michael Carden, CEO and co-founder of online performance management firm Sonar6, who count OAMPS Insurance Brokers as one of their clients, said what your star insurance broker needs is attention.
“Spend time on your insurance broking stars,” Carden told Insurance Business. “For example, if you have 10 people in your business and let’s say two of them are a total pain – they gossip, they create problems. Then you have one person who is a complete star. Your natural tendency is to fix the problem of those two people.
“You end up ignoring the star as they’re great! They are not a concern. This results in you nurturing the underperformers.”
Carden highlighted the role of “differential management,” where the way you manage your star employee is different to your solid or poor performing staff.
“If you have a broker who is underperforming, you will go and find things that they need to fix,” he said. “Say, for example, they don’t like calling people on the phone. You might think that is what they need to fix and they will become a better broker.
“If you have a star, they probably don’t have anything they need fixing, but you are a manager so you need to find something to fix! But you don’t need to apply this “find something wrong and fix it” approach, you need to harness the skills of your best employees.”
Carden added that you also need to stretch your star broking employee, this enables you to get the best out of them and that they are fulfilled.
