COMPANY
St. James’s Place
WEBSITE
www.sjp.co.uk
INDUSTRY SECTOR
Wealth Management
NLR PROGRAMMES
Team Coaching
“I’m indebted to Andrew for his continued counsel and insights. NLR and The Curve® have provided the discipline to keep monthly focus on the end goal.”
Tim Willis – Regional Director, Head of Business
Financial Services Team goes from last place to No.1 in the company
In September 2019 Tim was the newly appointed Head of Business for Manchester. As he concluded his discovery work on the location, he found a disparate team of individual Partner Development Managers (PDMs), with a focus on short term individual performance and not functioning as a cohesive team.
This was borne out amongst other things, by the results 19th out of 21 locations and the worst performing large location when measured on a YoY basis (the method by which annual performance was measured). Some members of the team had been around for several years and others were newly appointed within the previous 12 months.
In 1:1’s held with Tim, members of the team articulated a lack of belief, lack of alignment, lack of accountability and a lack of trust, all of which were having a detrimental effect on performance. You might think that there would be only one way to go from this position (upwards), however, experience says this is not always the case.
Tim felt improved performance was all in the design. Could he achieve the desired results by design? Were they capable of influencing the Partners to such an extent, that Manchester would be recognised as a top location, or even an irresistible choice for THE top location? Tim felt he needed to engage NLR.
In Q4-2019 Tim asked New Level Results to work with his team. Having had experience of working with New Level Results with a previous team, he knew that the team programme would be the catalyst for change and the solution the team needed.
The workshop with the team was a huge success and resulted in their one-page plan that would support the team through 2020. The plan was backed up by The Curve® platform, which maps and tracks results around both the ‘How’ and the ‘What’.
Referencing the legacy statement every meeting, reminded the team of what everyone was aligned towards achieving. The Curve® proved invaluable.
Roll forward to March 2020 and the country is in lockdown. Teams everywhere were struggling to keep up, but not this team. The Curve® is an online system and it became invaluable to keeping the team focused. Embracing technology had been a plan goal and as a result, this team excelled almost immediately when 100% remote working commenced.
For the remainder of 2020 while other teams faltered Manchester went from strength to strength, building momentum, the only location with consecutive month on month growth for the final 7 months of the year. 19th in January to finishing the year 9th position overall.
People were starting to pay attention to Manchester location. However, the challenge was to keep the run rate going and build on it in 2021.
And they did…… The results speak for themselves; 36% growth, Every KPI met, Graded ‘exceeded expectations’ as a team and THE TOP performing large location in St. James’s Place. Tim commented that it was no exaggeration to say that the team would not have achieved these amazing results without the support of NLR and The Team Curve®.
Having a one-page plan and mapping and tracking the plan monthly the way The Curve® does, kept the team working as one team, gave air time to the issues that would not normally be discussed in most teams and help build a cohesive and highly functional team.
When asked for a summary about the impact of NLR and The Curve®, Tim provided the following statement.
“We are now almost 2½ years into a five-year planning cycle at the end of which we wanted to be able to see our legacy statement as a true reflection of what we had become. Despite a colossal 36% growth in 2021, we have just completed our best ever Q1 in terms of gross and net inflows with 8% growth YoY and placed 8th of 21 and of the big 5 Offices we are top!
The team are self-critiquing performance and calling out when standards slip or pace needs to lift. It’s been a great tool to quickly align new members of the team and to share with visitors to the team; who we are and how we operate.
At the start of the current year, we were able to drop some of our core values by which we wanted to measure ourselves monthly because they had simply become the normal behaviour exhibited daily.”
“The three areas which we chose as breakthrough strategies back at the start of the first planning cycle have seen exponential growth and we are now seen as ‘The’ office for all three strategically important growth areas around Private Clients, DFM and the Entrepreneur Club for Business Owners.
The Manchester Location is now regarded as a location for consistent medium-term growth, not the boom or bust of the past.”
Tim Willis – Regional Director, Head of Business
