Leadership: navigating change

Our strategy at Julius Baer Guernsey, centres on growth and operational efficiency in order to deliver value to our clients, and both are equally as important. To achieve this, we need our brilliant staff to do things differently, to find better ways of responding to our clients’ needs.

This is a big ask! We know what we do now works, and that makes us feel safe. Change can be intimidating and feel like a difficult step into the unknown. But clients’ expectations are changing, so we need to adapt to meet their needs, where speed is just as important as quality.

Speed allows them to transact quickly to meet market opportunities, or to manage their family affairs in a timely manner; but speed cannot come at the cost of quality - for our clients, for our key stakeholders and, importantly, in maintaining our high standards when it comes to compliance.

The need to marry speed and quality poses many questions, including importantly:

·??????How do we find more efficient ways to deliver excellent client service?

·??????How can we enhance the aspects of the process that add value?

·??????Which aspects of the process can be automated?

In answering those questions, we can be relieved of the mundane administrative aspects of the task and focus on the more creative aspects. We have the space to step back, analyse, think, innovate and challenge – to ask why, to ask… what else?

But how do we encourage our staff to approach work in that way?

Inspiration

We need to inspire our teams with the vision of what their day could look like. We need to provide the security that they will be supported on the journey getting there, and then give them the time and tools to make the changes that allow the space for creativity, innovation, and analysis. Technology won’t take our jobs, but it will allow us to do the jobs we should be doing, that we want to be doing, that we have the intelligence and flexibility to do.

At Julius Baer Guernsey, we are focused on supporting our teams to make the changes we need to make, so that they can focus on the parts of their jobs that are most meaningful and most valuable for clients. And as a result, ensuring that their days with us are interesting and rewarding.

Investment

Investment is key, whether that’s investing in technology to allow us to build workflows to automate aspects of the process, in dashboards to allow insightful analysis of data or in a change management team to support our business in driving process improvement.

We’re also investing through training our teams on the agile approach to implementing change, and we are recognising and rewarding those who embrace the opportunities that arise in this space.

As a leadership team, we must recognise that the business is going to look different, the critical success factors will evolve, and we need to adapt to ensure we too have the skills to lead in that space.

Importantly, we need to listen to and learn from our teams, to provide them with the training and the tools that let them lead the way in delivering excellent client service in line with our values of Care, Passion and Excellence.

Change is inevitable, how we face it will define our success.