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Insurance Industry News from ProgramBusiness.com

From Enjoyment To SuccessMore than 50 years ago, success guru Napoleon Hill wrote in Think and Grow Rich that the most successful people had a "burning desire for a particular purpose." More recently, Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great that the most successful companies do what they can do best and enjoy doing best. Hill and Collins stated a fundamental workplace principle: focus on what you do well and have a passion for doing well.

Asking an employee to do what you want them to do well can be a fatal mistake. For example, you might want a secretary to type faster. However, if they don’t have the necessary skills, the chances are that your efforts will go to waste. All too many businesses waste vast amounts of time and energy focusing on what their workers can’t do well, or don’t want to do well. If employees don’t enjoy a particular type of work, no matter how much managers pound their concerns into them, they’ll keep performing poorly — creating managerial headaches in the process.

Here’s a suggestion: Ask yourself, and those around you, what are the five things you can do best. What are your natural gifts and talents? After you’ve written those five items, circle the two activities that you enjoy or love doing the best. Spend 80% of your time on these two, and the other 20% on the other three, and you’ll be working to your highest and best use. Then have your employees do the same exercise — and watch productivity, and morale, soar.

Editor’s Note: Don Phin’s products and services have grown exponentially over the past year. As a frequent contributor to ProgramBusinessNews, I thought you might be interested in a letter I recently received from Don that outlines what’s been happening:

Dear Jack,

First off, let me wish you a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year! It
has certainly been an eventful year around here! In this memo I would like
to address updates to the HR That Works! site:

We now have approximately 2000 companies using the site. We have received
nothing but positive feedback. Thank you! Again, I can't fully express the
awesome feedback we have received from companies taking full advantage of
the program.

Given the input received from our users we have added the Compliance and
Productivity Plan ( a road map for site use and management success), The
Most Common Uses for the Site (another road map) and a site search engine.
We have started to record and archive the monthly teleclasses in MP3
format. Now they can be listened to at any time or downloaded to a CDRom
or MP3 player. Since we are constantly updating the tools on the site we
added a link that continuously informs the user of site changes.

This coming year we will be adding training modules on Employees Who Can't
or Won't Come to Work and Performance Management That Works!, a White
Paper on Pre- Employment Questionnaires and more. We will begin turning
the many Powerpoint Presentations on the site to an audio format. This
will allow online training for managers and the rank and file. Lastly, we
will be putting some of the content into Spanish. This is a tedious and
expensive process so we will start with the most essential documents
first."

We have also received positive feedback from our clients using the site.
Is your company taking "full advantage" of the site? If you would like a
tour through the site please let us know.


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Don Phin is an attorney and president of the Employer Advisors Network, Inc.
He is the author of Lawsuit Free!: How To Prevent Employee Lawsuits; Building Powerful Employment Relationships!; and Victims, Villains and Heroes: Managing Emotions in the Workplace.

Visit Don's personal web sites at
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