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Discover Benelux | Business | Columns
What communicates? TEXT: JOSIAH FISK | PHOTOS: COURTESY OF JOSIAH FISK
Would you pay EUR2,000 a year for a financial product you didn’t really understand? Before you answer, consider this: if you live in Luxembourg and Belgium, you could already be doing exactly that. According to Insurance Europe, the association for the EU’s insurance industry, residents of Belgium and Luxembourg spend close to EUR2,000 per capita on life insurance each year. In my book, when you’re spending that kind of money, you want to be clear on what you’re getting. Yet I’m willing to bet that few life insurance customers have a good working knowledge of their policies. With insurance, even more than other complex products, reading the contract – which is the definitive product description – is unlikely to help. Even if you understand what it’s saying (which is hard enough), it can be virtually impossible to know what that information amounts to in practice. It’s a little like trying to figure out how to set the time on your Swiss watch by looking at a diagram of all its gears, springs and ratchets. Even experts find insurance baffling. David Pearlman, the brilliant insurance attorney who invented the
US college savings plan, once said to me, “Whole life insurance is the most complicated product I’ve ever seen. I still don’t fully understand how it works.” Is there hope for the rest of us? I say there is, though it needs to start with better efforts on the part of the insurance companies. There’s a lot they could do. For instance, simplification should be able to reduce contract length by 60% to 75%, if it’s done properly. Adding a how-to-read section can help. So can reorganising the document so
that it follows the product lifecycle. Even just changing some of the jargon can help. Many terms are confusing because they describe things from the insurance company viewJosiah Fisk point, not the customer viewpoint. For instance, “surrender” seems like a strange word to use for making a withdrawal from your policy until you realise that from the company’s standpoint, they’re surrendering your money. In the meantime, though, don’t bother to try reading the contract. Instead, make sure you get a clear explanation from your insurance agent. And if they can’t explain it? My advice: don’t buy!
Josiah Fisk is the head of More Carrot LLC, a clear communications company with offices in Boston and Luxembourg.
What makes a good manager? TEXT: STEVE FLINDERS | PRESS PHOTO
Most managers become managers because they’re good at something else. Good food scientists, computer programmers, salespeople or whatever, do well enough in their jobs for them one day to be put in charge of some others. Quite a few then discover that a) they have two jobs instead of one, and b) they have no idea how to do the new one because it requires them to exercise a wide and complex range of soft skills which they have not had to use before. I believe personally that people can learn how to manage if they receive support and training, and my first question on my managementfor-beginners courses is usually: What makes a good manager? Over the last twenty years, the answers I have had to this question have changed a lot, and for the better. As Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, professor of leadership at the University of Bradford argues so convincingly, most leadership studies historically have been based on the findings of research carried out by white middleaged male American academics asking questions about leadership to white middle-aged male American leaders (a subset of the people
58 | Issue 7 | July 2014
Jared Diamond describes as the atypically WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies). Beverly decided instead to ask not the leaders but the led (very often women) for their views about leadership and, happily, their opinions are now seeping through into a far more useful mainstream view of what skills good managers need to exercise. Top of the list for many of my trainees nowadays is listening, but one management role that my trainees often forget is that of team ambassador. If there’s no ambassador representing the team to the outside world (often in boring meetings) and broadcasting the great work that the team is doing, then two things can happen. Your people get demotivated because no-one knows they’re there; and resources dry up because no-one is fighting their corner in the places of power. Alongside this goes the Alex Ferguson role, the buffer: stand up for your people in public, deal with mistakes in private. So work on your representational skills as a manager; and if you’re not very good at that, get someone else in your team to do it for you.
Steve Flinders is a freelance trainer, consultant, writer and coach who helps people develop their communication skills for working internationally. He’s also a member of the steering group of Coaching York which aspires to make York the coaching capital of the UK (www.coachingyork.co.uk): steveflind@aol.com
Steve Flinders