July Lessons Part 3: Really Invest in Personal Equity!

Abundance Accountability Respect

FlipboardTwitterLinkedInFacebook

Over the month of July, I will share lessons learned from my ATB journey, post my retirement announcement effective Aug. 1. The accomplishments and extraordinary results at ATB over six plus years belong to many. However, the learnings I will share are exclusively mine. I hope you will find them thought provoking, and perhaps even instructive.

Story: When you’re the Chief People Officer, one of the big responsibilities revolves around compensation. Pay and benefits are often the biggest single expense in any organization. It takes on even greater meaning when one considers this line item as an investment, rather than exclusively as an expense. How does the company get the best possible return for its investment?

Early in 2012/13, we began to introduce the concept of PERSONAL EQUITY into the organization. We knew that the promise of job security was an outdated principle. Heck, we could hardly predict what types of jobs might exist versus offer any employment guarantee. However, we could commit to peoples’ future state becoming better in every way until their very last date of work, whenever that might be. So we chose to make a statement to team members by challenging ourselves to create the best personal equity plan including, but not limited to, the greatest pension savings program ANYWHERE.  

Key Point: Every organization I’ve ever worked at shares one common viewpoint: People would like to be paid more! If you limit compensation to pay and benefits, it can often become an unsatisfactory and relentless chase of market comparison. However, by investing in PERSONAL EQUITY, the lens regarding regarding total compensation becomes much wider. Employees want and need fair pay and benefits. But what if the health benefits feel like they are made just for your situation? What if job experiences, and advancement opportunities are abundant? What if learning, formal and informal is plentiful? What if the leadership treats you like a self-accountable, autonomous adult? What if you are in a highly inclusive, cognitive and identity rich environment? What if there is a commitment to everyones’ financial, physical, emotional, spiritual and experiential well-being? What if the company made the following statement and acted accordingly? “People have the right to have great leaders.” And yes, what if the pension/savings plan was the best in the universe regarding personalization and company matching? With that overall strategy of PERSONAL EQUITY and total compensation, the ability to attract top talent accelerates. The best and brightest people seek that out. During my tenure we have had a few people leave primarily for pay, only to want to find a way back to more personal equity, and ultimately achieve a higher individual return.

Personal Leadership Moves:

  1. Think of investing in people compensation as a comprehensive PERSONAL EQUITY SYSTEM, rather than revolving narrowly along pay/benefits.
  2. At the same time, get highly creative and personal regarding base pay and benefits. Find a scalable and equitable way to customize them for each person. 

Personal Equity and Personal Leadership,

Lorne

One Millennial View: Of course money is an extremely important and necessary currency, but I’ve also come to realize that currency has many forms, not just monetary. Health, communication, culture, goals, time, knowledge, experiences, relationships, and others are also significant types of currency. So, while a great salary is desirable, it isn’t everything. A interesting one-liner I’ve heard is, “rich people have the same nightmares, just on a higher thread count.” I’m willing to bet the better the overall personal equity, the fewer nightmares.

– Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

 

July Lessons Part Two: Once Upon a Time

Accountability

FlipboardTwitterLinkedInFacebook

Over the month of July, I will share lessons learned from my ATB journey, post my retirement announcement effective Aug. 1. The accomplishments and extraordinary results at ATB over six plus years belong to many. However, the learnings I will share are exclusively mine. I hope you will find them thought provoking, and perhaps even instructive.

Story: Two blogs ago, I recounted the story when as a new Chief People Officer, at one of my my first Human Resource Committee meetings, a Board member became exasperated when he read an aspirational story I had placed in the Board “package.” He hadn’t realized it was intentionally visionary, and I noted how fortunate I was that other directors came to my rescue to explain its intent. Please read that very same story in the screenshots below. I am gratified to report that this story has become mostly true, and even more so. This blog is intended to reinforce the power of setting intentions rather than to be bragging. And frankly, any recognition for making this tale more fact than fiction belongs to a great leadership team, and more than 5,000 people who are the characters and heroes. I simply had the privilege to paint the picture and invite everyone along for the ride.

Key Point: Thinking BIG, starting small, and acting now is everything when it comes to execution. I believe you need to set the intention of where you want to go with more than a few phrases. The “painting” needs texture, and enough definition to allow people to see/feel what the design looks like at key milestones along the way. As you read the story below, you will note that I hoped our pipeline of people wanting to join our company would be about 10k per year. We currently get about 50k of solicited and unsolicited applications. I was hoping we might be in the top 10 companies to work for. In 2017, we were chosen by the Great Place to Work/Globe and Mail as the No. 2 place to work in Canada. Our Glass Door (not really on the radar back in 2012), has been a consistent 4.4 out of 5, and our engagement scores (from 69 percent in 2012, to 92 percent in 2018) puts us in the top five percent of all companies using that metric. Club 228 became known as Club Catalyst, with 900 members, up from 500. The idea of working where you needed to to get the best results became a complete reality. (Workplace 2.0). Rapid opportunities for different experiences became what we called experiential bursts. Our dream statement or purpose became our now, quite famous, 94 word ATB Story. And I can go on and on how we exceeded this entire aspirational statement overall.

Yet, I missed on some things too. Although I was successful in getting the idea of personal equity imbedded as a principle, the Equity Story Book idea failed miserably. I just couldn’t get the project over the goal line, although our recognition system has become partly that concept. I also could not get the sabbatical notion off the ground. On the other hand, I kicked off something called My Time (a self-accountable sick leave/vacation system) which I believed was a better and broader system. Still, I couldn’t get that implemented either. I think that was a leadership failure on my part.

Overall, my teammates took the aspirational statement below and made it much better. Illustrating the future picture with enough texture and sensual context helped start a culture  movement. And wow, did Team ATB accelerate that movement into a culture that is just beginning to differentiate us. The best is in front for the new leadership to move forward.

Personal Leadership Moves:

  1. Please read the aspirational story written in 2012 below, and see what you think
  2. Try writing your own aspirational story.
  3. As always,Think BIG, start small, AND act now. Make it happen. Engage the community, and it will become better than you might imagine. Just execute, iterate, pivot, execute again and repeat.

Aspirational in Personal Leadership,

– Lorne

Story Here: 

One Millennial View: If that isn’t great inspiration for aspiration, I don’t know what is. As I mentioned a couple blogs ago, I don’t think most Millennials even contemplate sitting down and writing their aspirational story… But why not? Heck, if you’re brave enough, make a YouTube video of it and broadcast it for the world to see. You never know if the right eyes might see it. What have you got to lose? 

– Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

 

July Lessons Part One

Accountability

FlipboardTwitterLinkedInFacebook

Over the month of July, I will share lessons learned from my ATB journey, post my retirement announcement effective Aug. 1. The accomplishments and extraordinary results at ATB over six plus years belong to many. However, the learnings I will share are exclusively mine. I hope you will find them thought provoking, and perhaps even instructive.

Story: When I joined ATB, I was amazed at how much of the organization was traditional in the context of work being about time and place. It was mostly a classic nine to five environment. Our wealth management division was experimenting with people being able to work where and when they needed to. However, this more advanced thinking was not yet an enterprise wide strategy. 

It was 2012, and I had just heard an intriguing presentation by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson who wrote the book “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix it.” It essentially challenged traditional thinking that work was about attendance and just showing up versus work being about achieving results at any place or time. Why not treat employees as self accountable, fully functional adults? And so we began the conversation as to why we would initiate what we called Workplace 2.0, first with our leaders and then the rest of the community. Essentially, this new way of working had only two rules: 1. Show up where, when and with whom you need to get the best results. 2. Remember no results equals no job. For many leaders, the idea of having people working from anywhere they needed or wanted was initially very uncomfortable. After all, how would we know people were really working and not just taking advantage of us? We were amazed to see how Workplace 2.0 rapidly caught on and became foundational for advancing our culture. 

Key Point: When you treat people with total trust, ensure they know what’s expected and challenge them as very self-accountable beings, they rise up and then some. They become truly remarkable and exponentially better in creating outcomes and increasing productivity. Judgment and keeping score by attendance soon goes out the window. “Sludge,” or trash talking about where people have been when not at their desk, essentially goes away. When you give people reasonable autonomy and personal control, it creates a sense of business ownership, regardless of authority or level. 

Personal Leadership Moves:

  1. Think about how much control you exert over when, where, and how people do their work. Contemplate the waste of unnecessary oversight you have and/or have given others. My learning is that people will more than respond in the most productive ways when they have well defined self-autonomy and accountability.
  2. Stop taking time and attendance, and substitute with “no results equals no job.” Not a threat, but real world truth telling.
  3. Fire anyone consciously trying to take advantage of the system.

– Lorne 

One Millennial View: At my previous position, I was scheduled to be at the office at 5 a.m. but I was dependent on the function of a train from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes it was delayed, and on occasion it broke down. Considering it was 2017, I was able to do work on my phone while in transit. By the time I showed up to the office, I already had the same amount of work done as if I would have been sitting at my desk. Ironically, I’m not sure it was even necessary for me to be at the office that early.  The key point is, “no results equals no job,” and it doesn’t matter where you get it done. Employers and team leaders should know that even if someone is on a train, the workload and responsibilities do not need to go off the rails.

– Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis