What’s Your One Thing?

If you’re like me you’ve probably heard the buzz around the catch-phrase: What’s your one thing? Wondering how it all got started I did a little research. Turns out it’s from a self-help business book, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

When I first heard the question I knew our one thing right away.  Since we are a collection agency you might think the answer is a no-brainer: to collect money.  And yes, you’d be right, we certainly collect a lot of money. But honestly that’s not our one thing.

Is it compliance?  Another good guess. The debt collection industry is highly regulated at both state and federal levels. Compliance is extremely important to us here at A. Alliance. We spend a lot of resources and work hard to stay abreast of all regulations and what’s happening with court rulings and proceedings. But that’s not our one thing either.

I could go on and on, but will cut to the chase.  Our one thing is caring! Everyone here at A. Alliance cares about our clients, consumers, patients, communities and each other.

We are blessed with excellent, caring leadership which binds us together as a team and keeps us focused on our goals while providing a terrific work environment marked by intelligence, compassion and kindness. Our Mission Statement includes values of honesty, balance, integrity and fair play. Our leadership team lives these values every day.

By caring about what we do, who we do it for and each other together we are committed each and every day to doing our best to collect each and every dollar owed to our clients, professionally and in a timely manner.

This is a tough industry, oftentimes it is difficult working with situations that are inherently negative. By always focusing on being helpful we all maintain a positive outlook which translates to better experiences for patients and consumers as well as outcomes for our valued clients.

One of the passages in the book that spoke to me was, “Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

Don’t get me wrong, A. Alliance knows we must never stop trying to find creative solutions, advanced technologies, or services that create value for the Company or our clients. But if extraordinary results are what you are after first and foremost you gotta care!

A. Alliance Collection Agency, Inc. is a full service, licensed accounts receivable management and debt collection agency providing highly effective, customized one on one management and recovery solutions for our business partners.  Founded innorthern Illinois in 2005, we have been proudly improving the bottom-line on behalf of our business partners in and around Chicagoland for over 14 years.

Wasting Away in the Pit of the Perfect

Last week we published a blog written by my colleague Harry Stoll focusing on the optimal time to turn placements over to a collection agency.

Harry shared some very good guidelines to help the process, but sometimes it just boils down to someone waiting for the ‘perfect’ time.  Rarely is there a ‘perfect’ time to do anything, however.  Optimal, yes.  Timely, yes.  Perfect, highly unlikely.

Perfectionism as an attribute can be a blessing and a curse.  In the medical profession perfect is the goal and often times ‘good enough’ just does not cut it.  However, in other businesses, close is often the best choice as the penalty for waiting is lost business, market share and competitive advantage.

So, when does close enough roll over into too perfect, or perfectionism?

In an article titled “How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way” by Alice Boyes, PhD, (Harvard Business Review, read it here) she wrote about ways of mitigating the negative impacts of trying to be perfect.

She writes “…perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. Having high standards and being hardworking can help someone stand out in a crowded field, and their tenacity can help them improve their skills over time.”  Yet these traits also cause perfectionists to “get in their own way.” She lists the following as just a few of the challenges being, working with, or for, a perfectionist can have:

  • Struggling to make decisions or take action: “Perfectionists are motivated to make the absolute best choice — even when doing so isn’t strictly necessary. This can lead to decision paralysis.”

 

  • Worrying excessively about sunk costs: “Since perfectionists tend to ruminate over even tiny mistakes, they’re strongly motivated to attempt to recover situations involving sunk costs…they can spend too [much time] working on marginally productive activities before moving on.”

 

  • Avoiding challenges to avoid failure: “Perfectionists want to feel absolutely ready before taking on challenges. This can lead to holding back from advancement or leadership roles.”

 

  • Applying their high standards to others: Sometimes the “…perfectionist also expects others to conform to their standards…being too demanding can harm relationships and sometimes lead to…being socially excluded because they’re emotionally hard…to deal with.”

 

  • Ruminating about weaknesses, mistakes, and failures: “One reason perfectionists are so strongly motivated to avoid small mistakes is because making them triggers their tendency to ruminate… [this can lead to] irritability and feelings of depression, and can disrupt the person’s performance and relationships.”

 

What can we do about it?  She suggests several things:

 

  • Learn from successes: “The idea of learning from your mistakes is likely to feel too confronting to a perfectionist, and trigger rumination. An alternative is to learn from your successes. By reflecting on the pathways that led to your successes, you’ll be able to see that you achieved a meaningful end despite not doing everything completely flawlessly…”

 

  • Develop heuristics to enable faster decision-making and action taking: “Heuristics or rules of thumb are aimed at producing good decisions most but not all of the time. They help balance the benefits of faster decision-making against any incremental gains you might get from delaying action and continued thinking.”

 

  • Ask yourself “How could I improve by 1%?”: “Because perfectionists want to be flawless, they’re typically dismissive of incremental gains. By looking for how you can improve your behavior by 1%, you’ll start to see that there are easier ways to improve than what you’re imagining.”

 

  • Learn strategies to disrupt rumination: “It’s a lot easier to tolerate making mistakes and having flaws if you know how to curb rumination. Notice when you are starting to mull over something, and ask yourself if obsessing over it is really helping you. Often, rumination feels like problem-solving — but it isn’t. If your thoughts are just going in circles, or you’re noticing that your rumination is putting you into a bad mood, let it go.”

 

There is, of course, no perfect plan of action.  We are human after all.  Sometimes it is just better to try ‘ready, fire, aim’ to achieve at least some progress. And after all, since none of us is perfect, progress over perfection is often the best path to follow.

A. Alliance Collection Agency, Inc. is a full service, licensed accounts receivable management and debt collection agency providing highly effective, customized one on one management and recovery solutions for our business partners.  Founded in northern Illinois in 2005, we have been proudly improving the bottom-line on behalf of our business partners in and around Chicagoland for over 13 years.

Image provided by: : Alpha Stock Images – http://alphastockimages.com/  Original Author: Nick Youngson  – http://www.nyphotographic.com/

 

All Work and No Play Makes Jack and the Workplace More Than Dull

Back in the day when I first entered the labor force, work was a serious matter that needed to be taken, well…seriously.  When we were taught how to do something, it was done that way or the highway.  Socializing too often at the proverbial watercooler was frowned upon and kept to a minimum. If not, you risked being labeled as the office slacker. And the idea of having fun while at work was pretty much unheard of. Why? Because the prevailing thought was that if you were visiting with a coworker or having fun, you weren’t working.  Working and having fun were mutually exclusive.

Fast-forward many decades (ouch!) and company culture is all the buzz. It’s no wonder, since a company’s culture is in essence its (collective) personality.  Thankfully, today, a lot of organizations understand the philosophy behind a strict hardnosed work environment is not only antiquated, but the belief that workers having fun aren’t productive couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, research published in the book 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work by Dave Hemsath has shown that when employees enjoy themselves at work they are typically: more productive, more creative, experience greater job satisfaction, have more loyalty to their employers, and lower levels of absenteeism.

Another study published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior revealed a link between having fun and informal learning (a common way employees acquire new skills that improve their job performance).  According to one of the study’s authors, Michael Tewes, it isn’t necessarily the fun activities that teaches the new skills, it’s the fun atmosphere that creates a better learning environment. Fun in the workplace can also bring co-workers together to create a cohesive team of workers that are able to get to know each other better, build greater trust, and are more apt to help each other.

Of course, like everything, there are pros and cons to a fun-loving company culture.  Moderation is, of course, important—it can’t be just a free-for-all. Common sense will tell you too much fun does have the potential to hurt productivity, plus there are those, especially older workers from my Baby Boomer generation that still haven’t embraced the new philosophy.  Like with everything in life, balance is key.

 A. Alliance Collection Agency, Inc. is a full service, licensed accounts receivable management and debt collection agency providing highly effective, customized one on one management and recovery solutions for our business partners.  Founded in northern Illinois in 2005, we have been proudly improving the bottom-line on behalf of our business partners in and around Chicagoland for over 10 years.