Identify touch points
After Caylor became the leader of the
Houston office, she and her senior leadership team prepared a questionnaire
and distributed it to all the Merrill Lynch
employees in the area.
Through the questionnaire, Caylor and
her team sought answers to the question,
“How can we better connect Merrill
Lynch to the communities we serve?”
Employees were asked where they volunteered their time, on which boards
they served and where they wanted to
see the company move in terms of staying connected to Greater Houston.
“The answers came back around children, education, helping the disadvantaged and reaching out to all of the ethnic groups in the area,” Caylor says. “We
kind of gathered this information, and
then in our 11 offices in the Houston
area, people were nominated to step up
and make some connections with these
groups in the area. We created a process
for new opportunities to get involved, so
that every employee got to do that on a
regular basis.”
Through the questionnaire and feedback, Merrill Lynch began developing
what Caylor calls “touch points” within
the community — organizations through
which Merrill Lynch could strengthen its
connection to its community and potential customers. In 2008, the company had
35 such touch points throughout the
Houston area, including business, civic,
philanthropic and arts organizations.
After identifying the ways in which to
best connect to the community, Caylor
and her leadership team began formulating ways to make it happen. She says she
wanted to bring together representatives
from the various departments within
Merrill Lynch as part of a community
involvement group, which was charged
with developing a single, uniform way of
integrating the company into the Houston
community. She calls it “delivering one
firm.”
“There is a weaving together that needs
to take place, and we’re doing it by
bringing all of our business units
together on our community involvement
group,” she says. “We have a lot of services offered here in Houston. The trust
company is here, private banking our
investment bankers, and what we have
done is create a council to deliver one
firm. We are one of the early marketplaces to have done this, and we have
senior leadership representatives from
each of those business groups who meet
and talk about how we effectively [connect with and serve the community],
how we bring our intellectual capital to
bear in the Houston area.”
The community involvement group
now meets monthly and helps organize
events attended by Merrill Lynch
employees, clients and community leaders, including a distinguished speaker
series and a campaign to assist philanthropic organizations.
Caylor has also tried to take her community-oriented mindset to the Merrill
Lynch organization at large through her
communications with peers and superiors around the country.
“We have gotten together with a lot of
collaboration and have done it at the
divisional level and have had dialogue
across all the touch points of Merrill
Lynch,” Caylor says. “I just returned
from a leadership meeting for women
sponsored by our general counsel. We
had representatives from our chief financial office, from human resources,
regional directors around the country,
national sales managers, talking about a
number of issues, including this concept
of delivering everything we can bring to
bear to the cities that we live and work
in.”
Inspiring other managers is a major
key to spreading the idea nationwide. A
philosophy of community involvement
and community connection won’t survive in a business unless the leader sets
the example from the front.
“Lead from the front, but do it with heart and passion,” she
says. “Engage your people. You can do it broadly, as we did
through questionnaires, but organize people who really care
and do it from a giving back standpoint, not a getting more
business standpoint. I have been confident from the day we
began that business will flow. That’s not what this is about.
This is about truly adding value to your community, to all of the
citizens.”
