Guard against inertia
Kreutzer wants to see employees who are
enabled to come up with new ideas, because
he believes that one idea from a single
employee can change a company.
If you challenge your employees to think of
new ways to accomplish the same tasks, it’s
not necessarily reinventing the wheel.
Kreutzer says that any new perspective from
a person in the field can be a valuable perspective.
“I’ll use the example of client service,” he
says. “It has been done in many different
ways, but many times, the client is getting
many of the same types of service they’ve
gotten for the last 10 years. There have been
so many innovations and changes in the
means of communication and means of
expectation for a client, there are a lot of
questions I’d ask of someone who was servicing a relationship the same way they had
been for the last 10 years.”
Merrill Lynch holds advisory council meetings with every level of management throughout the firm nationwide. The meetings are
designed to formulate those types of questions
and share them with the rest of the company.
“Every division has (an advisory council)
representation who takes ideas and then
brings them up to the very top of the firm,”
Kreutzer says. “There is advisory council
management within each region, which bubble up ideas for improvements on a regional
basis for things we can control. They can
communicate up in many ways, be it e-mail
or phone or visits to New York, and they hold
meetings quarterly. The minutes of those
meetings are shared with every employee so they can see what the ideas from the field are.
It’s a very effective communication process
for new ideas.”
Kreutzer says offering challenges and stimulating new ways of thinking helps breed an
entrepreneurial mindset in a company. But
once you have your employees thinking that
way, you have to stay in front of them to continue soliciting and receiving their ideas. As
many large companies do, Merrill Lynch’s
leaders hold a number of town-hall-style
meetings. As with the group training meetings, it’s an opportunity for employees to interact with each other and with management.
“Financial advisers are some of the most
creative people when it comes to finding new
ways to serve clients, and they bring their
ideas individually to people like myself,”
Kreutzer says. “I can point to two or three
things that changed our firm dramatically,
and it was generated from one person who
had an idea and it just bubbled up, and now
it’s accepted practice throughout the firm.
“An example is the way in which we market
to prospective clients through a pitch book.
[That] was generated from the field. We needed a consistent, professionally done and
informative piece to hand to clients to educate them not only about Merrill Lynch but
also about the team and individual doing it on
a local basis.”
You have to be willing to build your client
and customer service philosophy from the
front lines on up. Kreutzer says that is the
only way you will be able to build a business
truly centered on the people you serve. If you
can’t respond quickly to the needs of the people you serve, your business will have a hard
time surviving long term. That is especially
true in a state with a tumultuous economy
like Michigan.
“Without an understanding of what the
client’s main concerns and main goals are and
then their secondary goals, if you try to implement solutions that don’t fit their needs, it’s not
going to be successful,” he says. “Our job is to
understand clients’ needs. When you understand the goals of the client, you do a great job
helping them achieve those goals.”
HOW TO REACH: Merrill Lynch, www.merrilllynch.com
