Support Staff Overview

MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS WITH STAFF

There is one very important differentiation between support staff and producers. The sooner a manager understands it the better. It simply is this. Whereas a producer can make or break your career, support staff can only break your career. Are there exceptions? Probably. But in the main that is it.

There are some more differences between producers as a category and support staff as a category:

	Support Staff	Producers
Gender	Mostly female	Mostly male
Pay	Mostly underpaid	Some overpaid, some underpaid
Ego	Sometimes inflated	Usually inflated
Attention to detail	Have it (or should)	As rare as a sober night at the Lohans
Susceptibility to whining	Variable	Higher than Cheech & Chong
Replaceability	High	Tougher as production increases
Revenue production	Indirect	Direct

Is it a good idea to have good relationships with staff? Answer: duh. Can support staff save you from catastrophic errors? Yes, but here is the rub with that statement. If they do their jobs at the professional plain that you should insist on, saving you/branch/producers from screwing up should be standard. If they can’t do that, then they should just go away.

The undeniable fact is that there are quite a few more people out there that can do or be trained to do support roles than can be significant producers. Therefore, in the cold hard light of supply and demand, support staff will command significantly lower compensation. They are also viewed by the firm as fixed costs. Your office will constantly be viewed through the lens of appropriate staff levels. And by the way, the only way those staff levels go up is if your revenue goes up. In this era of increasing centralization of operations and back office staff of all stripes, your ability to control who sits in those remotely located chairs will continue to decline. The inexorable demand for profitability results in all fixed costs under fire.

Look, this does not mean support staff are superfluous, or unnecessary or not deserving of respect. To the contrary. Because, quality support staff are hard to find and keep, they deserve to be treasured. But the reality is they should be viewed differently than producers.

Doug ran a big office in a big city. It was consistently profitable and near or at the top of any metric his firm could apply. Regarding staff levels, his philosophy was to keep one more staff than he needed. That way, when the inevitable downdraft would hit and the firm’s P&L would look like Swiss cheese, he would always have a place to cut where he would not have to cut into bone. Yes, that meant that he was a bit less profitable in good times. And how he managed to keep a surplus person around was a source of lots of head scratching by his peers. But when times turned south, he had the cushion he needed to satisfy the ruthless bean counters in the headquarters.

Support staff consists of two very different groups. Operations and sales support. These two groups can be contrasted as follows (sure this is grossly oversimplified but try to follow along):

	Sales support	Operations
Client communication skills	Should be high	Virtually non-existent
Producer empathy	Absolute must	Desirable but not key
Allie in battle for compliance	Helpful	If they ain’t got this, they ain’t got nothing.
Helps retain producers	Good ones do	Not really
Useful as info conduits for you	Yes	Yes
Errors will cost you	No	Yes
Smile required	Yes	No

Want to end your career early? Sleep with your staff. Want to fail audits and get bounced? Ignore your staff. Want to have office morale problems? Treat your staff like dirt. Want to look like an Adam Sandler style buffoon? Let your staff run all over you.

In general then, there are the following 7 commandments about dealing with staff:

1. Treat them like you want to be treated.
2. Understand the psychology of a support person.
3. Be sure they are in the right role for their skills.
4. Put people persons in sales support.
5. Put traffic cops in operations.
6. Don’t sleep with them.
7. When in doubt, follow commandment 6.

What have you learned about dealing with support staff? Have examples? Email them to manageia2@gmail.