Members of Engagement Multiplier’s community come from a huge variety of industry sectors and geographies. One theme common to everyone is the importance of great leaders.
A number of our community members come to us from the financial sector, including employee benefits, life insurance, and wealth management advisers – industries that require significant people skills, as well as financial know-how. In other words, they require great leaders. Our clients tell us their work demands they be engaged so they are able to listen and engage with their own clients. As more than one has commented, “when you’re handling someone’s money, you’re handling their lives.”
Chris Hale, COO of Perigon Wealth Management in San Francisco, describes his company as “young and innovative – especially for the wealth management business.” He describes Perigon as “a collection of teams, and those teams come together around helping families. When you’re building a team whose purpose is helping families achieve their goals, engagement is part of our alignment.” That’s exactly where having tools to measure engagement becomes a game-changer.
Here’s how they use Engagement Multiplier to create higher levels of employee engagement – and the significant results they’ve seen.
Purpose
“Engagement Multiplier has been pretty amazing for us in terms of purpose. In wealth management, it’s easy for us to say ‘our purpose is to help clients manage their wealth.’ That’s not only boring, it’s not a real purpose. It’s a by-product of what you do. Going through the Engagement Multiplier process, it became clear that we had to spend a lot more time clearly articulating our purpose as an organization.”
Process
“We’ve worked really hard to build a cool corporate culture. We’re in San Francisco, it’s part of the ethos out there. It’s easy to let go of being more empirical about engagement. But Engagement Multiplier does an incredible job of defining what engagement is. It gives us a goal as an organization. And it’s a process you have to go through every quarter.”
Unexpected by-products
“We’ve had a huge unexpected by-product. We grew about fivefold in the past 2.5 years, and the challenge in doing that wasn’t just maintaining clarity of purpose, but also who the leadership is. When we were small, it was pretty clear; but now we have people responsible for different units and different teams, but we had a bit of a vacuum in terms of tried and true leadership. This engagement model has allowed a couple of the people we thought would be great leaders, but who didn’t have the permission or opportunity to demonstrate themselves in that way, to really take ownership of this process, and they’re the leaders in the organization now.”
Watch the full interview with Chris Hale here.
So, in simple terms what can you learn from Chris’s story? Whether you’re a wealth manager or not, the ability to rally your team around an Engaged Purpose and create leadership positions for those in your team even where a vacancy doesn’t currently exist will not only strengthen your organization, channeled properly, it can transform it.
Learn more about the transformative power of employee engagement software in connecting your team and building great leaders.
