By Michelle Venturini
Requirements of the Financial Services industry are unique and demanding, including compliance, data security and literacy, and high service levels. Meeting client and regulatory expectations requires a high-performing team.
Whether you have a team of two or 20, your high performing team needs a high performing manager. That’s an intimidating mandate, but if you think about it, you’ll see the logic.
Your team can’t provide exceptional service without exceptional management. Being a high-performing manager is your service promise to your team members.
Let’s look at a few core management skills and compare average performance to high performance.
Goal Setting
Your team needs to know the vision you have for your practice and the expectations you have of them. It doesn’t matter if a goal is SMART. What matters is if a goal is communicated, enabled, and managed.
An average manager sets goals once a year, discusses them two or three times during the year, and reviews them at the end of the year. Some goals are met, some are missed, but there usually isn’t any consequence.
A high-performing manager sets goals once, then continually manages them. Goals are completed or de-prioritized and replaced. It’s an organic process that happens constantly, not a once-a-year event.
Goal priority serves as the agenda for most meetings. If it’s not a high-priority goal, time isn’t spent on it.
Need to decide where to commit resources? Ask: which goal does it serve?
This approach keeps everyone laser focused on what’s important. It also quickly filters out who is onboard with your vision and who isn’t.
Culture Development
Your practice has a culture, and culture drives how your team engages with you, clients, and each other.
An average manager lets their culture develop through daily actions and decisions without a strategy around what they’re doing or the impact of their actions.
At the end of the day, they might think “I was really short with my team today. I need to work on that.”
But they don’t always follow through with meaningful action, and they usually don’t understand how their interaction with their staff drives their staffs’ interaction with clients, and ultimately their culture.
A high-performing manager identifies the culture they need to deliver the vision they have for their practice, and they intentionally manage to cultivate that culture.
Want to deliver white glove service? Understand that doing so requires a culture that makes team members accountable for delivering what clients need when they need it.
Remove barriers. Empower staff to make decisions. Embrace and celebrate mistakes made in the name of service delivery.
Feedback
Feedback is critical to employee development and delivering the service you promise. Miscues will happen. Course correction will be needed. Great results deserve recognition.
Feedback is called for in all of these situations. Providing feedback is one of the hardest, but most important, management skills.
Average managers provide feedback during planned performance reviews, usually once or twice a year. This means that feedback could come six to 12 months after the event.
Whether the feedback is corrective or congratulatory, that gap is far too long to be effective.
High performing managers make feedback part of everyday conversations. If you know an analyst has delivered exceptional service, tell them right away, and be specific.
For example, “I know you stayed late last night to research the Smith’s questions. That’s an example of the white glove service we promise. Thank you.”
On the other hand, if service wasn’t what you expect, don’t wait to address it.
For example, “The Smith’s emailed the office on Tuesday with questions about their portfolio. Our white glove service promises a response within 24 hours, but you didn’t get back to them until this morning. Let’s talk about the delay and how we can get better.”
If this isn’t the first infraction, the feedback should be more pointed.
Communication
The methods and tools have changed, but good communication remains the foundation of high-performance management.
Average managers have one or two preferred communication mediums. They communicate updates on an as-needed basis, sometimes without thinking about all the people who need to know.
In general, communication is incomplete, and team members develop their own workarounds to compensate for missing or untimely information.
High-performing managers recognize that timely, thoughtful, and complete communication is the grease that keeps their office running smoothly.
They intentionally use a mixture of informal conversations, email, text or IM, and formal meetings according to the message and the audience. One-on-one meetings are rarely rescheduled, and the team member drives the agenda.
Management is hard. It’s understandable that your skills and delivery slip over time. However, just like client portfolios need to be re-balanced, great managers make a point of reviewing and sharpening their skills on a regular basis.
Your high-performing team deserves a high-performing manager.
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Michelle Venturini is a CPED instructor and an independent consultant providing HR consulting services and coaching. She has more than 25 years of leadership and operations experience across all HR functions. She has earned her SPHR designation and holds an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.