National Healthcare Insurance Provider

Healthcare insurance provider implements Behavior-Based Precision Leadership and achieves 1500% rise in net productions following first full year of implementation.

More than twenty years ago this healthcare insurance provider scored poorly in every business indicator, particularly in meeting customer service standards. Using ADI’s behavior-based Precision Leadership® (PL) technology, the company experienced a phenomenal turnaround and has never looked back, because commitment and adherence to the technology continues to bring escalating achievements.

Situation:

In 1980 this insurance provider had to face the fact that complaints, poor morale, stress and dwindling productivity were the only growing aspects of the business. In fact, the organization’s sales representatives spent most of their time explaining the company’s poor service. The organization needed to do something fast, so when they heard about the behavior-based process called Precision Leadership, they sent in 12 top officers and 150 managers to learn the methods.

Solution Implemented:

Using the analytic techniques learned in PL training, the company’s management team performed a top-down overhaul of company strategy, developing key measures of corporate goals and tying them to individual performance measures and pay-for-performance goals. Management quickly recognized that with the escalating demands of the changing healthcare industry, they had begun to treat the staff as machines, emphasizing quantity over quality and damaging customer relations in the process.

The new behavior-based strategy addressed three areas – clarifying corporate vision, developing appropriate manager/employee relations, and streamlining systems and processes.

Within a year of PL implementation the company enjoyed the best year in its history. That record year was followed by an even better year in which net productions rose by 1500 percent. The company’s emphasis on clarity of job functions, measurement and recognition and reward with a focus on excellent customer service won it a reputation as a premiere employer. Today, more than 20 years later the organization continues to thrive by holding every process and reward strategy (including an equitable gain sharing plan) to the standards of behavior-based performance improvement. The CEO who spearheaded the PL impetus retired in 1998 but passed the commitment to PL on to his successor who stated, “Everybody has computers, equipment and buildings, but if you have the right people with goals, direction and recognition, you can move mountains.”

Results of Intervention:

  • A record-setting year following implementation of behavior-based process
  • A 1500 percent rise in net productions in the year following the record-setting first year
  • 20 years of sustained improvement and meeting or exceeding corporate goals, with behavior-based PL still the “way of doing business”
  • Recipient of several national excellence awards and established reputation as premier employer

This is a system that assures consistency and continuous improvement into the future,
if used properly, regardless of who the players are.

—Gene Thrasher, CEO, established PL as a way of life at his firm