egyii blog

Teamwork, a key to success in many business environments, works seamlessly at times, but does face numerous challenges. In team situations, there can be obscure amounts of jealousy, feelings of neglect, a lack of authenticity and the tendency to jump to quick conclusions, just to name a few of the complications.

What then transpires due to these and other challenges? Cliques are formed, feuds happen and morale is down. This then results in lower performance levels, a lack of productivity, and general negativity which, ultimately, causes the teams to fall apart.

How to keep teams intact? Trust. Trust is the backbone to teamwork.

..the most critical, foundational building block of a team is trust. Without trust most teams are really disparate collections of individuals called groups. The element that creates or erodes trust is your individual behaviour. Charles H. Green, Trusted Advisor Associates

Business team leaders therefore need to build trust, by behaving in a trustworthy manner. The team members won’t trust them for the sake of trusting. It is too risky. Therefore, the team leaders need to lead and exhibit the traits and characteristics that create trustworthiness. It is up to the leaders to drive two of the following Trust Principles:*

Collaboration: To work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavour. (Merriam-Webster)

A few examples:

Team leaders need to demonstrate trustworthiness by constantly involving the team member. Don’t speculate about what your team is thinking – ask them.

Value meetings over phone calls and phone calls over emails. Make it personal.

Practice putting all issues on the table for joint discussion.

Transparency: The art of being transparent. Transparent: 1) free from pretense or deceit: frank 2) easily detected or seen through: obvious 3) readily understood 4) characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices. (Merriam-Webster)

Nothing destroys trust faster than the team leader who appears to be withholding information or trying to control the team member. Be willing to be open about your practices.

Most organizations recognize that trust is an important consideration in their company’s success, but many employees don’t feel it is being nurtured internally. The main culprit? Top management… Charles H. Green, Trusted Advisor Associates

Trust drives relationships which drives teamwork, therefore team leaders need to set the example and drive trusted relationships… to keep the teams together.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

*The Four Trust Principles, Charlies H. Green, Trusted Advisor Associates

The leaders who work most effectively have trained themselves not to think “I.” They think “we;” and they think “team.” They understand that their job is to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it. But “we” get the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done. Peter Drucker.

The following is an article from the Singapore Business Times, January 13, 2010, written by the Managing Director and Head of Private Banking Southeast Asia and Australasia for Credit Suisse, Dr. Francois Monnett.

He gets it, but do they really “walk the talk?”

Retaining clients, rebuilding trust

The sustainability of the private banking business model comes under scrutiny in the wake of the massive industry shake-up. In the aftermath of the massive industry shake-up which has taken place over the last 18 months, we are confronted with a very different operating landscape in private banking. Together with a significant loss of trust and confidence in the markets and industry, clients are also expecting higher standards of service and advice, as well as greater transparency and disclosure over products and services. There is also a shift towards safer, simpler and more liquid investment solutions.

One major implication is the critical question of the sustainability of the private banking business model. During the boom period, many institutions built their private banking model primarily based on the assumption of continued growth and perhaps a certain belief in its immunity to economic cyclicality. The infrastructure that many private banks have put in place to deliver value to clients and the fact that much growth has been built through expensive acquisition of bankers have also resulted in a costly model.

Revenue generation in private banking, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, has been very much volume-driven with a heavy reliance on a sales culture. With slowing revenue generation and increasing cost-income ratios in the past 18 months, the sustainability of this business model has been seriously tested. Much of the pressure is also coming from outside, namely from regulators and clients, that will propel the industry towards more radical and dramatic changes to the business model.

In the rapidly changing regulatory environment, investment suitability is here to stay and investor protection will become an even more important dimension in this business. There is also a lot of discussion on offshore banking, capital requirement and bankers’ compensation.

But the most important driver for change is the disillusioned clients. There has been a significant loss of investors’ trust and confidence in the markets, in regulators, in the financial institutions as well as their advisers. We have also observed among clients a flight to safety and quality, a shift from risk aversion to loss aversion, and a back-to-basic type of appeal for more direct and liquid investment vehicles.

Very importantly, there is a much greater need for transparency and disclosure. This is not just about the products, but also the service levels that clients pay for, fee structures, performance of their investments, as well as transparency regarding business partners and counterparty risk.

Client segmentation

For private banks to reclaim and reaffirm their critical status as trusted advisers, we need to enhance our value proposition on a few levels. First and foremost, we need to focus on client segmentation and differentiation to significantly lift service levels.

To put the client at the centre of a segmentation strategy is the only way to avoid the ‘one size fits all’ approach, which doesn’t work to lift service levels. This requires a disciplined, systematic and structured approach to defining client segmentation that goes well beyond assets under management. It has to consider the source of the client’s wealth – is it inherited or built? It has to consider the investor’s behaviour – is he or she a delegator, a participator or self-directed?

We also need to understand better the investor’s knowledge, experience, sophistication as well as domicile. Once these dimensions are clearly mapped out, the resulting value proposition has to deliver a tiered service offering in a disciplined and consistent way that will define different access to product specialist or management as well as the depth and breadth of the service offering.

Eventually, we will be measured as well in terms of the level of transparency and interaction we achieve with our clients. Risk management has to be an integral part of the advisory process and an investment suitability framework is the ultimate transparent guide to portfolio construction.

This involves the profiling of clients – the detailed and structured assessment of their knowledge and experience vis-Ã -vis the complexity of the portfolio solution, and their risk and loss tolerance. This profile is used to build a portfolio which is simulated in terms of asset allocation and is fully disclosed to the client.

Consistent client experience

The private banking business is all about execution. We need to deliver on the promise of being a trusted adviser in a consistent way. A major pre-requisite for a consistent client experience lies in the bank’s IT-based processes. From the relationship manager (RM) accessing an open architecture platform with thousands of solutions for the client, implementing a common advisory process, to utilising portfolio construction tools that build asset allocation against the client’s profile and analyses of risk scenarios – this level of consistency can only be achieved through a control process.

The re-engineering of processes is critical not so much for productivity gains, but has enormous impact on how much time the RM is able to spend with clients and the quality of the client experience. A recent study shows that RMs spend as much of their time marketing services to new clients as solving and dealing with administrative matters. If we are not able to free RMs from the loss in valuable client-interacting time, we will not live up to the promise of being a trusted adviser.

From a client perspective, there is also a constant request for better, more consolidated and comprehensive client reporting. They also want more direct access to almost real time data through client portals.

As private banking continues to grow in the Asia-Pacific, automation, IT systems and the re-engineering of processes will increasingly become the backbone of the business. How good a bank’s infrastructure is will be the cornerstone in delivering quality client experience. It will optimise relationship management time with clients and ensure a culture of consistency throughout the firm.

Re-skilling of RMs

If we want to differentiate ourselves in terms of providing an advice-centric operating model to clients, we will also have to consider the extent to which we need to re-skill our RMs. The permanent education of RMs is of paramount importance. Particularly in Asia-Pacific where the industry is still young and fast-growing, there is an immediate need to make sure that the culture of a firm is being consistently instilled into the new joiners that all bankers interact with their clients through a consistent and structured advisory process.

Eventually, as front organisations continue to expand, we also need to enable RMs to grow in their roles over time, from a junior level adviser, to an expert RM or a manager and leader. This requires a long-term, modular and state-of-the-art training curriculum and development model that captures the career cycle of each RM. It is also important to align reward systems with the clients’ satisfaction. When we measure performance, we need to focus not only on ‘What financial performance did you achieve?’ but also the ‘How did you achieve it?’ metric. This softer side of performance measurement has to be benchmarked against the values of the bank and how it wants its RMs to run the business, and against the client’s satisfaction. This will involve tracking the degree of adherence to the sales and advisory process, risk management tools and control standards, as well as client satisfaction surveys.

This greater alignment is a condition for regaining and earning more trust with our clients in the new landscape, acknowledging the new landscape, refining and sharpening the value position and eventually delivering on a bank’s brand promise.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Tough times require resiliency, especially in a cut-throat business like insurance. Your company’s branding, name and reputation, products won’t do it. It’s all about your people.

With pressure from the economic downturn, a large Singapore based insurance company needed their financial planners to deliver every time.  However, the financial planners were not getting the right support they needed from their direct management. Read how Egyii’s Andrew Sidwell helped turn the situation around. Coaching for sales performance

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

“It’s all about long-term professional relation building. Leverage & greed were the cause of the financial crisis.” JP Cuoni, CEO EFG Bank

Jean Pierre Cuoni, Co-Founder & Chairman of Swiss based EFG bank, saw the light early on in the private banking industry.

Mr. Cuoni retired in 1994 from Coutts as the CEO, and held numerous senior positions at Handelsbank NatWest and Citibank.

In 1995 he and Mr. Lonnie Howell set up EFG bank.

Mr. Cuoni, in the business since 1960, realised that little had changed in private banking. He said (and still says) that banking is personal and all about relationships, relationships that lead to trust and confidence in the bank relationship manager and the bank itself.

However, in the 1990′s, he started to see things fall apart in the banks’ operations. The banks were changing the way they operated. “Hedge funds, structured products, funds of funds, alternative investments… All these are new products that only started in the 1990s.”

The business was becoming less personalized and was lacking the proper client focus.

So, in response to the shock of this, EFG was born.

EFG is very unique in the way it operates. EFG woos older, experienced bankers who are looking to be on their own, however, would like an infrastructure to support them. They use their skills to become “private bank entrepreneurs”- running their own business off of EFG’s physical platforms.

This, combined with a caring philosophy and approach to clients and relationships, has lead to a huge success. Although business is down, as we all expect, EFG continues to flourish ahead of many of the “fallen” banks who focused purely on the bank’s motives (vs the client’s motives).

On a local level, I have met Mr. Kees Stoute, Managing Director of EFG Singapore. Mr. Stoute worked his way up in the  banking business from roles in IT and as the COO and MD in other banks before joining EFG. Why did he make the change to EFG? He saw EFG was following  the core beliefs and principles that make a bank successful.

I had a conversation with Mr. Stoute on trust, an integral part of both his and EFG’s business philosophy. The following is an excerpt from that conversation:

“Trust is not a soft skill. It makes the difference in the business. Trust is the core of business,” said Mr. Stoute.

EFG is and should be the model bank of the future.

For more information on EFG Bank, click here. You will be greeted with the following important message:

“What is the essence of private banking?

Relationships, and the conditions for them to flourish. A nurturing environment, that enables our people to excel at crafting solutions for you.

To us, the fundamental building blocks are people.

Professionals of the highest calibre, free to act in their clients’ best interests. Who strive to eradicate life’s inconveniences; who simplify complexity.

Welcome to EFG Bank, truly a private bank unlike any other.”

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Sales professionals often need the proper support and feedback of management to be successful. Sales managers want to support their team members; however, the methods used by the managers can at times be more harmful than helpful.

Why is that?

Often there is a lack of clarity and focus between the manager and the sales professional on the behavioural expectations

Coaches often don’t understand the behavioural change process and therefore cannot gain the commitment of their staff to want to take action

Managers don’t observe their performers ‘in the game’ enough to know how to identify and target key behavioural development opportunities

The typical approach to coaching someone is to “tell” the salesperson what to do vs. asking effective questions to help lead the salesperson to improved performance

What to do about it?

Managers need to be equipped with the right sales coaching skills by understanding how to be an effective coach. They need to  learn skills on how to conduct coaching sessions that develop the key skills and that help change the behaviour of others.

How is this accomplished?

Managers need to:

Build their attributes of an effective sales coach required to create a positive coaching experience

Recognise individual differences in approaches to learning and adapt the coaching discussion to suit the needs of the individual

Identify exactly what skills and behaviours managers expect from their sales professionals in order to achieve the desirable outcomes

Enhance observation skills for assessing and identifying key behaviours, client engagement skills and sales activity at critical stages of the sales process

To provide positive and corrective performance feedback that builds and maintains self esteem

Enhance coaching communication skills (asking and listening) in order to  increase personal commitment to individual development opportunities

Demonstrate competence in the delivery of a  coaching model

Be able to set and monitor personal development plans to reinforce behavioural change after the coaching session

For more information, see maximising sales performance and skills

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Today I saw a press release advertising an online course in Customer Experience Management, emphasising its ability to show learners how to measure a set of key aspects of the customer experience.

To me the very concept of customer experience management conjours up images of organisations somehow trying to control the experience the customer has with them. It reminds me of CRM software and operational processes and metrics applied to every aspect of the idea.

Of course, it’s great if an organisation can improve the way its customers experience the process of buying and using their product or service,  but this is a very different thing from a group of executives trying to manage such a thing.

What it comes down to is the way people behave, both in carrying out tasks in the background that support the customer experience and in interacting with customers. Yes, it’ important to have efficient systems and processes. But too often executives focus on these because they are quantifiable and easy to manage, to the exclusion of creating positive change in their people.

This is the hard part. Much easier to install a new Customer Experience Management system. From my 20 years experience of helping people at work learn and change, it seems that three conditions are necessary for this to work:

We must become acutely aware of the need for change

We must look honestly at our existing behavioural patterns and the results they are producing, and feel inspired to give our customers a great experience. This inspiration can come from different sources depending on the nature of the business and its leaders.

We must know how to change

We must be given tools that enable us to change both our thinking and our behaviour in our own special way. Scripted recipes for all to follow will never work. When our individual map of the world is in line with the idea of giving a great experience to our customers, then the behaviour will follow with relative ease.

We must be given the chance to change

Expecting habitual thoughts and behaviours to change overnight is unrealistic. This takes time. We need to be given a plan where we make simple, small changes over a specified time period as we install our new patterns. This means we need reminding and supporting.

So my plea to organisations our there talking about managing their customer experience – help your people first. Help them to be the very best they can be and then let them loose. And stop measuring them!

James Irvine, 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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On 16 January the Singapore Business Times hit us with another ‘bad news’ article: ‘Employee engagement in Asia-Pac drops – survey’.

As if the economic downturn were not enough. Now motivation seems to be suffering in part because, as Mak Yen Teen, Director of the Asia Pacific Research and Innovation Centre at Watson Wyatt, says, the perception of fairness of rewards at this time is down. It seems people are unhappy about accepting reduced bonuses and lower pay to help avoid layoffs. He goes on to mention that in order to manage employees’ perceptions, companies must communicate the exact reasons for the changes being made and make sure that these are seen to be fair.

No doubt the perception of rewards does have an impact on employee engagement, as do many of the actions of management. In fact, events that happen to us, whether in regard to management decisions or economic influences or some other issue, will always have some kind of effect on our feelings about our work.

But can you imagine going through your entire 40-year career allowing your mood and motivation to be controlled by events over which you have no control? When things are going well for you personally or for the economy, you are fully engaged and positive, and when things take a turn for the worse you are miserable and unenthusiastic. What a hell to work and live in! And what a burden for companies to bear!

Today we have the opportunity to create a new world of business, with new approaches and new practices. Let’s start by making sure we enable our employees to feel enthusiastic and committed, if not passionate, about their work whatever outside influences may impact them. This doesn’t mean that companies have to ‘do’ anything to their employees. It’s a mistake to think that every every employee problem can be solved by doing something to them.

Rather, let’s take a step back and show our employees how to think about their lives and work in a way that is empowering for them. Once they learn that their happiness is entirely determined by how they individually respond to events that happen to them, then they have great power to change, and get control of, how they feel and work.

Responding doesn’t just mean saying to yourself  ’Oh, the economic crisis is actually fine’. It means learning to accept what is happening and allowing yourself to go through whatever feelings, including negative feelings, that you may have. When you simply accept events and don’t resist your emotions, then your anger and frustration lessen and you begin to focus on taking whatever action you need to in order to live in the present moment, within the crisis.

So help your employees to see this crisis and any future event with a new pair of eyes – eyes that enable them to deal with it in a positive, practical way, all the time realising that how they see the event is merely a thought in their own heads. And over this they have ultimate control.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore