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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Three Employee Types


Minders, Finders and Grinders
While at sea in the Navy, (which seemed to be forever) they offered college credit courses. During one of the Principles of Management classes the professor mentioned that there are three employee types, Finders, Minders and Grinders. The Finders were the savvy customer oriented, sales type folks who weren't that great technically, but everyone loved them. The Minders were the great coaches, leaders, spokespeople and supervisors. Great Minders were process-oriented and dedicated to making the team work well together. The Grinders were the highly technical yet customer unfriendly types. They did great as long as they were left alone and required little communication with others. Most people are a mixture of all three with certain characteristics that make them stronger in one of the areas. What I have found during my many years of management in Sony, RCA and GE, is that when you have someone who is very strong in one of the categories, they are usually weak in the other two.

It takes a great manager or business owner to identify these specific talents in each individual and know how to best handle them so they meet the objectives of the business. While running a service shop for RCA, I've had to take one of the most technically competent men and move him to a position that requires very little customer interaction. I did this because I wanted to continue to use his talents and could not get him to improve his interpersonal skills sufficiently, no matter what I did. This guy would actually tell customers they were stupid and how they were wasting his valuable time! I wanted to fire him on several occasions and yelling or counseling didn't help. He was one of the most talented guys in the country, technically, I did not want to send him to my competitors. So after some discussion and thought, I just moved him into a role that limited his contact with customers to . . . never. So we locked him in a room away from everyone while he did his thing. Occasionally we would throw some food into the room just to keep him alive. (I'm just kidding) If an employee is extremely valuable technically, yet challenged in interpersonal skills, sometimes you have to be creative and redefine his or her role so it doesn't include customer interaction. For some, a good script, some role play and practice will get these folks over the hump of communicating effectively.

As far as the strong Finders who are technically challenged, technical training should help in most cases, or you can use them a sales professional and/or lead generator only.

Of course you still have the variety of customer personalities to deal with. Some folks love to carry on a conversation and build a relationship with the service professional whereas others just want you to do your job, give them the bill and get out.

I really believe the great service professionals and great managers are those who recognize that there are unique differences in everyone and the method in handling every person is unique also. Having the ability to recognize these differences both in employees and customers and responding to them appropriately is what really makes the service experience you offer a great one.