Align around a priority
To Jenkins, the top priority in rough seas is to get people aligned as a team with the direction you’re pursuing. At HPB, Jenkins and his senior leadership team wanted employees to better serve clients through a more full, team-based financial planning focus.
“From a leadership perspective, you need to do a couple of things — call it alignment,” he says. “It has to start from my chair and the message that we send out with the strategy of the business and our strategy is to serve our clients as a team and go to them with an integrated plan based on a team of professionals.”
In any economy, building alignment starts with you.
“It’s really interesting how your employees and your team will take the lead from how your management team works together,” Jenkins says. “If they see us working together … it starts with that senior team, and do the words and the music go together, do they see us doing what it is we say we should be doing as a business?”
To follow that up, you need to begin to put your money where you’re alignment is.
“It’s got to be part of their role mandate, what the organization asks them to do, it’s got to be part of their compensation plan,” Jenkins says. “If you pay people for things different than what you’re asking them to do in the strategy, guess what, it isn’t going to work. So you line up the strategy in the business, you line up the mandate that you ask of them, you line up how you pay them based on team-based compensation. If any one of those breaks down, you start to struggle.”
Doing that means putting in systems like merit raises on team performance. As you’re implementing, you need to make an effort to show people you’re attacking a down market.
“The way to keep your employees is they need to feel a part of something, they need to feel that they are with a firm or a wealth management business that is moving forward and going somewhere,” Jenkins says.
So as you go forward, bring in people who know what’s going on. Explain overarching team strategies with the why, as in, “Here is why we’re doing this right now.”
“If your professional teams and your employees don’t understand the why, then there’s the risk they may not understand what it is they’re attempting to do, whereas if they understand the why and the what’s in it for them or what’s in it for their clients, my view is you get significantly better engagement,” Jenkins says.
As you do that, work employees into the strategy. If you’re in a service business, have them get feedback on what’s keeping customers/clients up at night and get managers to report common themes. At HPB, for example, baby boomer clients were constantly expressing concern over being part of the Sandwich Generation — people taking care of both their children and their elderly parents. HPB came up with a program that used multiple professionals to coordinate the mature family member’s finances easily.
