Brett Bernard needs to take national changes and initiatives and drive them down to a regional level.
As the regional managing director for the central portion of Merrill Lynch’s U.S. geography, including Michigan and Ohio, Bernard has been charged with relaying the reasons and anticipated effects of Merrill Lynch’s 2008 acquisition by Bank of America, and driving it down to an employee population of 1,500 spread across multiple states.
It is a task that has required a lot of communication on the part of Bernard and his leadership team and has reinforced the importance of remaining candid and accessible during a time of change or uncertainty.
Smart Business spoke with Bernard about how to use communication to keep your organizations strong when the future looks murky.
How did the leadership team initially assess the situation after the merger?
With an acquisition of this scale, when you have Bank of America and Merrill Lynch coming together with such long histories and complex organizations, it’s a major challenge and opportunity to figure out how to leverage the breadth and depth of both platforms. That takes some time, because you have a really broad and deep solution set. So it’s just a matter of getting to know the leadership team, better understanding the platforms and solutions that are now available to us, in addition to everything that we’ve always had at Merrill Lynch, and thinking about how we can best communicate that to our broad employee base so we can better serve clients.
How do you communicate with employees during a time of transition?
During transition, the first rule for me is to overcommunicate. If you’re going to err on one side of communication, make sure you overcommunicate. In the absence of information, people will draw their own conclusions and, oftentimes, will base things on rumors and erroneous information.
I would say that getting to know the partners across different lines of business gets us to know accurate information, and then candid communication of candid information that employees are going to care about the most, what is important to them. You also need to consider that people absorb information differently. Some like e-mail, some like more satellite broadcasts, some may want it in written form, and some may really respond to the eyeball-to-eyeball, in-person communication whenever possible. So we’ve attempted to do all of that.
How did you connect with employees?
Across the last year or so, we have had senior executives visit our market in metropolitan Michigan and Ohio multiple times, everyone from the chairman to the CEO to the head of commercial banking, global wealth management, all coming into the market to engage our associates in open dialogue formats.
But when it comes to how you communicate, I would go back to overcommunicating with candor — in other words, provide information in open dialogues and different settings. Also, understanding the other side of the merger or acquisition is important, knowing the people you’ll be working with, meeting them and understanding them in a professional environment and also understanding them personally in a more social context. If you can get to know people on a more personal basis, it allows you to pull fences down and get to know the individuals that you’ll be working with and allows you to see very quickly if they share the same purpose and core values you share.
You might be coming from two different backgrounds and trying to come together as one, and you’re hoping to have a similar, complementary vision and values system.
