Get to know your people
Achten couldn’t start creating a vision
without any information, so he first needed
to get to know his organization and the
people in it. He did a fast overview of the
company and knew employees were delivering a high level of service to clients, but
he wanted to dig deeper and know more
about the individuals he would be leading.
“People don’t care what you know until
they know you care, so it’s important for
me to come in, get to know the individuals,
what they were trying to accomplish, get to
know their practices and how they interacted with their clients,” Achten says.
He spent most of his first 100 days there
meeting with employees, mainly the 116
financial advisers. He spent between a half-hour to an hour with each employee, sometimes over lunch or dinner, to learn about
him or her personally and professionally.
Achten didn’t set an agenda for the conversations, but he let the employees dictate
the direction.
“I wanted to know about them and their
family and interests, and just what they
were looking to accomplish in life, what
they were looking to accomplish within the
firm and how they interacted with clients,”
he says. “Just everything they were comfortable talking about — it was fairly casual, and I took a lot of notes.”
Listening is one of the keys to making
these conversations successful, so employees know you are actually interested in
what they are sharing. Achten says he did
about 85 percent of the listening and let the
employees do the majority of the talking
during conversations.
“It was through listening that I gained a
true understanding of who the advisers
were as people, what they needed from
their leader in order to provide the premier
client experience and what vision they had
of the Merrill Lynch office,” he says.
To prove he had listened, Achten met
with all employees once he completed the
process to share what he had learned.
“I just shared with them, here’s who we are as people, and I wanted them to understand that I heard exactly what they had
told me — not individual personal things,
but as a group, this is who we are, this is
our business, these are our business metrics — so everybody saw where I was coming from,” he says.
Spending time getting to know your
employees requires a significant commitment. Achten worked many long days to
meet with every employee. But even though
you need to commit time to your employees,
you also need to make time for the other
daily duties and challenges that may arise.
“As much time that I put into getting to
know people, I always blocked enough
time to deal with the crisis situations that
may come up or trying to get information
out … and continue to get ideas out and not
just bunker in for three months and not be
visible,” he says.
From these conversations, Achten was able
to learn about the quality of the people, both
personally and professionally, and the level of
service they were delivering to clients.
“I felt like, in a fairly short amount of
time, I got a lot of feedback from the organization, and I was able to connect to people
there, so then when we went to phase three
… there was much more buy-in because I
took the time to get to know them upfront,”
he says.
Achten says you need to actively listen to
get to know them better.
“Knowing your employees inside and out
will inevitably make their professional
experience more fulfilling,” he says. “This
professional fulfillment then motivates
advisers to deliver the highest caliber of
client service.”
