LinguaCare Associates, Inc. was featured in an article for Small Biz Magazine, a division of Business Week. Below is an excerpt:
TALK IT OUT
When Vickie Pullins and Jackie Frazier founded their Hurricane (W. Va.)-based speech pathology company, LinguaCare Associates, in 1990, they were confident they could work well together. They’d been friends since meeting in college almost 20 years earlier. But as the company grew, they started to feel overwhelmed. It wasn’t until 2006 that they brought in S.K. Miller, a coach with Margate (N.J.)-based Collaborative Strategies, for some outside perspective.
Miller asked the partners four questions: What are you good at? What are you not good at? What do you love about your job? What do you really dislike about it? Soon Pullins and Frazier had hired an administrative assistant to pick up the paperwork that was weighing them down. Pullins now focuses on long-term strategy, while Frazier handles the bulk of the personnel and management issues. The two became so much more productive that they decided to extend the analysis to all the employees at their $1.3 million company. With a shortage of speech pathologists nationwide, particularly in West Virginia, Pullins says LinguaCare can ill afford to let a qualified person leave or to allow anyone in the company to be underemployed.
The results of those four simple questions were just as eye-opening the second time around. Kristy Stowers, who was working for LinguaCare in a rehabilitation center, had been consistently unable to hit her target of five hours of patient work a day. After the evaluation, Pullins and Frazier discovered that Stowers was up against some internal problems at that particular rehab center, including too few patients. Yet Stowers thought she had strong organizational skills and an ability to manage big projects.
So when Stowers moved on to the next contract, with a large medical center, Pullins and Frazier had her manage two other workers. Stowers has thrived, even initiating some new screening protocols. “She has become somewhat of a visionary leader,” Pullins says. “We are so surprised.” Stowers is pleased, too. “This facility is more fast-paced,” she says. “I’m always busy and I feel more productive.” Pullins says the company now plans to reevaluate the 18-person staff on a regular basis: “We need to ask every couple of years whether we are tapping into our people’s gifts and interests.”
To read the full article, please visit http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_66/s0806052903081.htm
