Grow leaders
Perpetuating a culture doesn’t stop with involving your current employees and managers. Bowman says you also need to lay the groundwork for future leadership by training your best and brightest to take the reins.
At Merrill Lynch — which earned $451 million in revenue last year in the Philadelphia market — leadership candidates need to exhibit an ability to serve others, both inside and outside the organization.
“I want people that are client-focused, that are here to help others do things,” Bowman says. “I want people who know they’re here to help people do more, get better, get to different positions in life, and I want the people who work in all five markets to feel the same way. I want them to have vision, to want to win, to stand for something and have an opinion about things. Every day, they need to be as positive, upbeat and helpful as they can.”
One of Bowman’s primary jobs in laying the foundation for the company’s future is to expose up-and-coming leaders to as many different experiences as possible. He says it’s easy to stay in touch with what’s going on in the company via e-mail, but leadership training should be more hands-on.
“It’s pretty hard to not know what is happening in our markets even if you’re just sitting at your desk and clicking on different computer screens,” he says. “But one of our jobs in leadership is to focus on things that can help our employees broaden their experiences with clients. We try to expose them to new products — and maybe old products that they haven’t thought about.”
By giving the next generation of potential leaders the tools and knowledge to do their jobs, Bowman and his senior managers can see how effectively each employee utilizes the resources handed to him or her. By observing, Bowman finds strengths and areas for improvement and the employee’s willingness to collaborate with others.
When building a team of leaders, both for the present and for the future, your goal should be to leverage the talents of your employees in a way that accentuates their strengths and compensates for areas of weakness.
“Somebody has to be open to being a teammate and has to be open to learn, open to growing the business,” Bowman says. “My job is to identify places where they can get better and to show them what might be a good business practice to get to another level.
“Somebody might be very good at asset allocation strategies for clients, whereas someone else might not be as good or as interested in that. But that person might be very interested in prospecting for 401(k)’s or for short-term cash management for companies. One person goes after the money, goes after that opportunity and brings that in, and the other person will manage the money.”
Once leaders have been identified, groomed and placed in positions where they can help perpetuate the company’s vision and culture moving forward, the next step is to make sure they stay at your company. To do that, you need to continue giving your employees the best available resources.
“The basis of keeping employees is to put a platform in place so they can do their job better here than anywhere else,” Bowman says. “Then you have to have a culture of caring and performance where the leadership firm cares about the folks who work for them. Again, it’s about expecting performance at the end of the day but providing them the venue to grow, being a part of their lives and doing it in a way that you might not find at other businesses in the industry.
“We spend more time at work than we sometimes do with our families, so we try to do as many things as we can to foster that family type of atmosphere.”
HOW TO REACH: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., www.ml.com
