Real-life resilience - MetLife Insurance

Hello friends! This week’s story is a fascinating insight into the power of thinking differently and seeking out optimism for success. If you find it interesting, please forward to a friend or colleague.

These newsletters focus on strategies to improve resilience to succeed personally and professionally. We look at preventative ideas and practical tools, so that we can all thrive when obstacles come our way. To put these ideas into practice, find more info here.

In the 1980s, MetLife Insurance had a huge sales problem. They were recruiting a whopping 5000 salespeople a year and spending a hefty $75m in training costs each year.

And it wasn’t working.

Half of the salespeople quit within 12 months, and 4 out of 5 of them were gone by the fourth year.

So over a period of 4 years, they were spending $300m to lose 80% of these recruits!? It was clearly not a viable model.

They decided to invest in a slightly radical approach by recruiting Dr Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Seligman was a pioneer of positive psychology which is the scientific study of human flourishing.

Seligman held firm on a belief that optimism breeds success and encouraged MetLife to adjust the application process for new recruits. On top of the usual screening test that salespeople needed to complete, Seligman added a second test that would assess the candidates levels of optimism. He then tracked 15,000 new MetLife recruits with these two tests.

In the first year, recruits who passed both the optimism test and the regular application test outsold those who only passed the aptitude test by 8%. In the second year, that number widened to 31%.

But that’s not even the most interesting part.

Seligman then convinced MetLife to hire recruits who scored exceptionally high on the optimist test but failed the aptitude test. And get this - those ‘super-optimistic’ recruits then outperformed the competent sales people by 21% in year one and 57% in year two!

Let’s read that again just to be clear. Exceptionally optimistic people (who couldn’t demonstrate sales competence) outperformed competent sales people by 57%!

Once MetLife adjusted its hiring process to start screening candidates for optimism, the results were indisputable. Within just two years, the company had reduced its recruitment/training costs by 60%, grew its sales force to over 12,000, and boosted its market share in the personal insurance sector by 50%.

Applications in today’s world.

Sales is hard. MetLife wanted to identify people who could handle frustration better, could take each refusal as a challenge rather than a setback, and find solutions rather than give up.

Resilience is our ability to advance despite adversity. MetLife’s adjustment in mindset is a perfect demonstration of that ability. Recognizing that whatever they were doing wasn’t getting results, the insurance giant adapted, tried something new, and thrived.

We have an opportunity to think the same way. Here’s how:

1) Adaptability. Imagine a CEO of an enormous insurance company approaching a positive psychologist for help today, let alone in the 80s! It took a lot of progressive thinking to consider a new way forward. Where are we looking for new ideas and solutions to our problems?

2) Reframing failure. Seligman found that when optimists fail, they attributed that failure to something that they could control and adjust, not to some inherent weakness that they had no power to change. This is the same for all of us, not just salespeople. It’s the idea of a growth mindset - that we can find a way through any challenge if we are positive and willing to look for it. Sales is hard - there is a lot of rejection. And so is delivering a creative project - often we are beholden to challenging deadlines and subjective opinions. We must practice our ability to reframe failure into an opportunity for future success.

3) Optimism. The biggest lesson here is a simple one: optimism delivers better results. So the question then becomes “how do we (and our teams) become more optimistic?”. There are several tools available to us all to apply, but my favourite are those that are simple: practicing gratitude, tuning into the good, shifting our perspective, and others. All of these can help foster a more optimistic mindset to help us do better work, sell more, and improve our professional (and personal) relationships.

Whatever we decide, we must do the work. It’s one thing to know something, but it’s a whole other thing to actually put it into practice. What’s one thing you are going to practice to increase optimism this coming week?

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carre @ Resilient Marketing Minds