What happened at Darleen's?

A small insurance company I worked with is a case in point for how a Reason for Being (aka mission/vision statement) can really motivate an organization.

This tale begins at a ranch-style home in a suburb of Madison. The home was not far from a lake—heck, nothing in Madison is far from a lake. I was hired to facilitate strategic planning sessions that designed the company’s future, the company’s mission and reason for being.

The seven leaders of the company—including Darleen, the CEO, whose living room we occupied—emphasized that their business had the ability to transform the workers’ compensation insurance industry; they wanted to add medical staff to the insurance team. Today, this is common practice, but back in the day it was truly innovative. This redefined insurance team would help its client company offer injured employees work that could be done while recovering from their work-related injury. This new option would minimize employees’ out-of-work time, which can be debilitating to the workers and increase costs for the company.

Offering work to injured workers that they could actually perform—thus enabling them to return to work more quickly—was a radical idea. In many instances, the workers compensation industry was rife with fraud. Sometimes doctors were unwitting pawns in employees’ schemes to get out of working. Other times, doctors prescribed treatments that made no difference to the employees’ recovery. The doctors would get paid for the bogus treatments that they prescribed, while employers and insurance companies were billed for those fraudulent services.

This was an exciting possibility to Darleen, who had experience with a disability. She suffered with polio at an early age, and the disease left her with a permanent, noticeable limp. However, she was otherwise healthy with an infectious optimism that she could overcome anything. Darleen was also compassionate and supportive of people. She was passionate about helping companies and workers deal with health and safety issues.

The company’s Reason for Being became ”To Transform the Workman’s’ Compensation Industry.” This completely galvanized and energized the company. It gave all the employees a very exciting future to fulfill on and to live into. A team based high performance organization was designed in order to fulfill on this future. 

As a result of this change, the company soared to the forefront of its industry. With this company’s new philosophy of “Return to Work,” the employee was supported in getting back to work in some capacity as soon as possible. As well as being psychologically beneficial to the worker, it helped companies control costs. In seven years, this insurance company went from $7 million in revenue to $250 million, from 7 employees to 200, and from one office to five. Did I mention it also went public? Many companies began emulating my client’s approach in managing workers’ compensation insurance, and the company’s leadership team began talking as if the industry really had been transformed.

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