In the world of financial services there are often times when organisational change must be managed.
Mergers, senior hires, takeovers, technical transformations all create situations where adjustments must be made to a new commercial or organisational reality.
Despite spending so much of their time planning for life's changes, staff in financial advice are no different to others in being generally resistant to change when it applies to them.
If you are responsible for ensuring a change programme is successful within your organisation there are several key areas to focus your time on.
Here are five top tips:
1) See the situation from a different perspective
If there's one thing that helps to move the needle in any change programme, it's the leaders rolling up their sleeves and getting on the floor.
This does not - and should not - mean that you should get into the weeds of any problem your staff bring to you.
What it does mean is that you should make an effort to see things through their eyes and address their real everyday concerns through bringing your eyes to their level.
2) Encourage empathy for other employees
A common theme of change programmes are challenges around different groups of people working together.
If you need to improve relations or empathy between groups, then there is no better remedy than moving people around.
Just as you should 'get on the floor' and see things from your subordinates' point of view, they should see things from their peers' point of view.
When this is done, long-standing issues can be magically resolved as people develop an increased empathy for others' situations.
3) Making the right hiring choices
It is surprising how often change programmes go on without those responsible for it vetting new hires.
You may know your Isas from your Sipps, but you can leave technical evaluations of these to others.
You need to make sure that those that work for you are going to help rather than hinder the changes you need to make.
4) Deal with bad behaviour promptly
The other, darker, side of hiring is firing. You need to take control of that too, as one of the most effective ways to change culture is to fire people.
It is said that director Orson Welles would get a stooge to show up to the film set on the first day of a shoot, do something Welles did not want, and Welles would fire him.
The message being sent was clear: my way, or the highway.
That does not mean you don’t follow due process, or give people clear warnings, or help them to mend their ways.
However, nothing sends a clear message of ‘I disapprove of this bad behaviour’ more effectively than dealing with it promptly and firmly.
5) Focus on training and own it
Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, had strong views about training: “Training is the manager’s job. Training is the highest leverage activity a manager can do to increase the output of an organisation.
