egyii blog

There is a lot of talk on trust today.

But let me ask one simple question. Where is the action?

The following are quotes from financial websites and financial leaders. Can you see the common theme?

“Trusted relationships. Advanced thinking. Our private bankers offer clients a genuinely different service. Our proposition is led by solutions rather than by selling clients our latest product. We will do nothing to jeopardise the integrity of the long-term relationships that we enjoy with our clients.“ Schroders Private Banking Website.

“Company leaders must foster a culture that focuses on integrity, strong execution, quality products, long-term value creation and doing the right thing.” Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase, reportedly saying that financial institutions need to clean up their act and earn back public trust.

“No matter how sophisticated, no matter how complex, ours is an industry that is underpinned by the fundamental building blocks of confidence, integrity and trust. These are basic principles in running a bank – principles which may have been forgotten along the way.”  United Overseas Bank Ltd. Chief Executive Wee Ee Cheong. 

“There is a certain level of disappointment and a need to re-build trust.” Francois Monnet, Credit Suisse MD and Head Private Banking, Southeast Asia/Australasia.

“The client is the driving force behind what we do: Develop and maintain long-term relationships by actively listening to client feedback in order to build trust and loyalty.” from The Merrill Lynch Principles: Defining Our Shared Values.

“If you look at the financial crisis the world is experiencing, it is a crisis of trust. The main currency we need to restore is trust between businesses and customers, as well as employers and employees.” Alain Rohaut, EVP HR, AXA Insurance.

Can you see anything different about the following?

“Those banks that caused our problems need to step aside. It’s time to go beyond a return to old-fashioned banking. It’s time to restore trust between banks and the customers we serve.” Gerard P. Cuddy, President and Chief Executive, Beneficial Bank, July 16, 2009.

Gerard Cuddy gets it. What about the others? All talk? All marketing? No action?

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

According to a recent study published by Dow Jones titled “Wealth Management After the Crunch,” the following numbers on banks’ performance were presented: 74% of the banks in Asia thought they over-performed through the crisis whereas 91% of the US banks were under the illusion that they performed well.

But, the reality is just 29% of the clients concurred with this.

The author, Bruce Weatherill, a former PWC consultant and now representing his own firm Bruce Weatherill Executive Consulting, states: “Clients are saying they look for service from life to death to the next generation. Wealth managers are delivering that by changing advisers very frequently moving in and out of markets. They don’t understand to be successful, wealth managers need to provide security, a long term vision and not just transactions.”

As for trust, Mr. Weatherill states that 65% of the wealth managers in Asian banks think their clients see them as “trusted advisors.” 

But, again the clients have a different perspective on this. Only 32% agree with this.

Mr. Weatherill states in the report that “Wealth managers underestimate the loss of trust that has resulted from the credit crunch. They need to recognise the damage and work rapidly to repair it.

There are other statistics around low numbers of loyalty between clients and the wealth managers, disagreements on the clients’ view of performance Vs the banks, Etc.

All of this leads to dissatisfied clients and all in all it is not positive (to say the least).

So much so that many of the clients are switching to other institutions and private wealth management firms.

We all don’t need to have these numbers to recognise that there are levels of denial and a lack of real client focus.

When will the banks and other financial institutions realise that it is time for a change?

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

What do we mean by ‘downturn’? What do we mean by ‘economic crisis’?  

The meaning we attach to words such as these, and hence to events that happen to us, is a very personal thing.

I may see the ‘downturn’ as something absolutely devastating to me personally, to my finances and to the happiness of my family. My morale will be sure to be rock bottom. On the other hand, you may see the downturn as an opportunity to cut out bad spending habits and save more of your income.

Even if you lose your job, you may see it a great opportunity to re-evaluate your life and start afresh, even if from a lower income base.

The thing to realise is that we have a choice about what meaning we attach to events. We can choose to let the newspapers, our friends or our colleagues influence that meaning, or we can choose to be the masters of our meaning.

If today we allow the newspapers or our colleagues to influence how we see our situation, it is likely we will become depressed. And if we then influence our colleagues with our own depressing viewpoints, our group morale will suffer.

But if we stop and think for ourselves and ignore other people’s opinions, we can choose to interpret the situation in any way we like.

It’s simply not true that because companies are losing sales, we all have to be miserable. Companies losing sales is a fact. But what we do with this fact is just a creation we make in our own minds. We can choose to interpret this fact in a way that makes us feel OK about ourselves, our family, or the world in general.

So, my advice is: don’t get swept up in ‘group think’ which lets your morale sink. Don’t follow everyone else’s interpretation of events. Take control of your own mind and find ways to feel OK – whatever is happening in the world, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which, of course, is just someone’s interpretation.)

For leaders, stop a moment and look inward so as to harness your personal resources. Find a new, more positive way to view your company’s situation and help your people attach more useful meanings to the events that confront your organisation.

We are fast realising that self-management is a critical addition to skills enhancement, and if we can learn to tap into our own internal resources, we will be stronger, more confident and more likely to perform at our peak.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Bill O’Brien, the late CEO of Hanover Insurance, once told C. Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U – Leading from the Future as It Emerges that when facilitating corporate change, the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.

This idea, that to create change in the new world of business, leaders need to look inside themelves first and connect with their own instincts, deep understandings and self-awareness, is the key to creating the kind of change that businesses need to succeed in the future.

It’s no good using the past to inform the present and future. What went well before, what the consensus of opinion is, and what is comfortable for the majority will only return businesses to the old world where external measurements and influences based on past experiences were used to decide on the future direction of the business.

According to C. Otto Scharmer, leaders need to engage in internal work before even considering change interventions. There are three kinds of internal work that need to be engaged in:

Suspending habitual patterns and seeing the situation with a fresh pair of eyes

Redirecting your attention from the exterior to your interior mental processes and really listening to yourself

Letting go of old identities and intentions

It is only when this internal work has been completed that leaders will be open to new visions and intentions, to redirecting attention to exterior action, and to creating new action, structures and practices to lead the business forward.

Every leader, whether a CEO or a learning and development designer, can benefit from turning inwards and connecting with their own source of wisdom before automatically adopting ideas and structures that are acceptable to the majority. These ideas will usually only present you with what is already acceptable and comfortable, and therefore what fits with the existing status quo.

Thus, the new learning and development will be first and foremost about internal awareness, insight and personal change. And coming out of this process will be new ideas, decisions and actions that will propel your business into a successful future.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Our thinking patterns determine how we feel at any moment. How we feel at any moment determines what we do. And what we do determines the results we get in our lives.

Everyone at this time is trying to tell us to change our behaviour.

Be more caring about your clients, engage them with empathy and reassurance.

Take more care over your tasks.

Pay attention and be patient.

Communicate your thoughts to your colleagues and boss with honesty and openness.

While this is all very well, nothing will change unless we all pay attention to the thinking patterns that underly all these behaviours. If I have a belief that says “never trust anyone until they first prove that they are trustworthy”, then it doesn’t matter how much I try to be open with people, I will always default to my underlying belief in practice.

So, if we all truly care about changing the way we do business in this new world, then the only way to show it is to stop all the activity for a moment and listen to ourselves.

How do we see ourselves?

Does our sense of identity match our behaviour, or are we living a false life?

What’s really important to us?

Do our values align with our behaviour, or are we rejecting these with every action we take?

And are we acting upon beliefs that we developed many years ago and which have no relevance to us today?

Are we sabotaging our future with these limiting beliefs?

Once we take control of our minds, the rest will fall neatly into place and we can start picking up the pieces left by an era of blindness to ourselves.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

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In his new book Branding Only Works on Cattle, Jonathan Salem Baskin says, “Today’s guerilla branding…(is) about giving consumers the reason and confidence to act, and the best way of doing this is by showing them behaviour that they can understand and trust. It’s all about doing things, not about saying things.”

In the ‘old world’ of business, branding was about communicating images, concepts and messages that will hopefully create an emotional connection with the audience and lead to brand loyalty. In the ‘new world’ business, according to Jonathan Salem Baskin, this just doesn’t work. People are too suspicious of your messages, and they have no interest in just listening to what you have to say. This means nothing to them without action.

In the ‘new world’ of business that we are now entering, brand loyalty rests on behaviour. Prove to your customers that you are real, authentic, and able to deliver what they want. Show, don’t tell.

This line of reasoning has a direct link to Private Wealth Management in banking. If Private Banks ever hope to win back the trust of their clients and hopefully, win over even more from competitors, then they had better shut up. Don’t make grandiose statements about your heritage, reputation and trustworthiness. Nobody’s going to listen.

To win in this new world of business, Private Banks are going to have to behave their way back to credibility. A bit like a wayward husband who has to seduce his wife all over again. Not with promises of fidelity, but with hour-by-hour actions that reveal his true intent. That’s why the future success of Private Banks is in their people, especially the people who interact and build relationships with clients. It’s in these people’s pure intent and concrete behaviours that the seed of new growth lies. It’s time for these venerable institutions to decide what specific new behaviours will win the trust of their ‘new’ clients.

So forget about designing a fancy ad campaign, or delivering a message of assurance from up on high. Get down and dirty with the specific actions your people can take to woo your clients minute-by-minute.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore 

“A man is measured by the size of his bonus rather than the depth of his integrity” Frank Partnoy, author of F.I.A.S.C.O., based on his experience as a salesman at Morgan Stanley in New York and Tokyo.

Some of the famous slogans from Frank’s days include praying on “the widows and orphans” or people who were naive and who put trust and large amounts of money into the people and institutions they invested with.

This reputation causes a big dilemma for banking today.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Individuals and management must be constantly asking whether they and/or their staff are being effective vs efficient. One can be very efficient,  however, the outcome may not be effective. What counts is what you actually do and what the actual results are.

Let’s look at use of time. It is worth noting that C. Northcote Parkinson, a British citizen and civil servant, spent some of his time teaching in Singapore. While teaching here he came up with the famous phrase “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson’s Law C. Northcote Parkinson was Raffles Professor of History at the University Malaya/Singapore in the 1950′s. The article (and the excerpt below) first appeared in The Economist in November 1955.

“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil…..”

The first sentence sums it all up. So we need to ask ourselves…

 Isn’t it time we start looking at what gets done and how you actually get it done?

(inspired by Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week)

 Trip Allen-Team Egyii, Singapore

It’s at times like these that I find re-visiting classic pieces of writing about performance and success worthwhile. Yesterday I took another look at Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which included this item written in 1934:

“One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.”

Fast track to 2008 and Joe Takash says in his book Results Through Relationships, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m called on to deal with dysfunctional teams, to coach a talented but flawed leader, to increase profit, or to improve productivity and morale; there is always a relationship issue. There may be other issues contributing to the problem, but relationships always play a large part in the cause of the problem… and its solution.”

I know that obtaining degrees and certificates helps to qualify you as an expert in a particular field. I also know that the way most businesses are organised, you are spending the vast majority of your time dealing with tasks such as emails, reports and research. Yes, knowing your business inside out and dealing with everything that lands on your desktop are critical. But isn’t this time of economic turbulence a great opportunity to step back and assess what areas need a laser-like focus to bring you career success and your company growth and profitability in the next few months and years?

The secret is relationships. Your ability to deal with people is now the critical success factor. In fact it always has been. And the only way to deal with people effectively and to get them to do anything, is simply to give them what they want. And what they want is, as John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers said, “to have a feeling of importance”. I doesn’t matter what situation or task you apply this to – what will enable you to forge lasting relationships and influence people is to make them feel valued and recognised. And this, above all else, leads to results.

So let’s spend some time thinking about our people skills and how we are going to use them to achieve much more than we ever thought we were capable of.