Publications & Resources

June/July 2007
Focus: Leadership

How Can You Better Build Your Team?

By Rebecca Doepke

Team alignment. It is the most important factor in successfully moving a financial institution forward, and often it is the most overlooked. New team members, new experiences, and new goals render a constantly evolving team-building process. Coaching is the constant factor in developing this base. Team members have to be molded, inspired and adapted to fit your vision and project goals. How successfully your team members work together and achieve these goals depends on communication and motivation.

These guidelines unite a team with a common vision and the right strategies and techniques to deliver a cohesive and consistent customer experience.

Create a Vision

Start to build a better team by defining for your team members the bank’s vision of the type of organization they want to become. Begin with your identity. Discuss how your financial institution began, your history, where the organization is going, and what makes you unique in the marketplace. Make your organization real for your team. By giving it a life and a personality, your team will have more passion for what they do. It’s important that team members understand the “big picture” for your organization and their role in it. They need to understand how they fit into the overall organization in terms of sales goals. Your team has to be aligned, working with the same purpose to achieve success.

Set and Communicate Overall and Specific Goals

Now that team members understand their role in achieving your financial institution’s mission, develop goals for them to support and achieve the bank’s overall vision. Build ownership and responsibility for delivering results by making the goals specific, realistic and achievable. Unattainable objectives will only bring heartache to employees and failure to the rest of the organization. Make sure your team has the skills and the knowledge they need to be able to complete these tasks. Realistic goals are endeavors that employees have the right tools and resources to achieve. And finally, break down goals into a series of small wins. It will motivate individuals to keep pushing towards achieving the larger goal.

Recognize and Leverage Individual Differences

As a team leader, it’s important to understand how you influence the thinking and actions of others, and when and where you tend to find challenge, energy, and inspiration. A key component in building a successful team is identifying your own profile and personality, and from there assessing the individual sales profiles of your team members. This step allows you to determine your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and the types of leadership styles that work best with individual team members.

Contextualize and Empower

Knowledge is power. Contextualizing your organization’s values and product and service offerings also adds strength to your team. For example, when your organization makes an important business move make sure your team understands the reasoning behind the decision. If you decide to discontinue a product or service, make sure your team knows why. The last thing you want is for a customer to ask why a product is gone and your employee to answer “they’ve made the decision to get rid of it.” Don’t allow your team to disconnect from the bank in this way. Providing a real and thoughtful answer makes a difference for the customer. When team members have information and reasoning, they are able to present a clear and united approach when delivering service to customers.

Run Effective Sales Meetings

Plan for your sales team meetings. Make an agenda and stick to it. These meetings are to ensure your team stays on track for achieving their goals. It’s important that team leaders stay on course, too. Provide opportunities within these meetings to discuss challenges they’ve encountered and ways to overcome these obstacles. Establish an open dialog with team members where no one is afraid of appearing foolish by sharing what they’ve learned. Also, discuss individual and team wins. It’s important to understand what works and how team members executed successes.

Evaluate Sales Results, Revise Strategies

Team development is an ongoing process that needs to be examined and refreshed regularly. Re-evaluate the goals you’ve set and the sales process. Analyze sales performance, identify strategies for improvement and provide useful feedback. Discuss how the team is progressing towards your overall vision and how far they’ve come. Positive reinforcement plays a vital role in building strengths and improving operations.

Communication and motivation are key components in these strategies to enhance the effectiveness and performance of team members. By building a better, more unified team, financial institutions are creating better customer experiences, resulting in larger deposits, greater retention rates, better fee income and more satisfied and loyal customers.

Rebecca Doepke is director of training and culture change for NewGround in St. Louis . She can be reached at 314-440-8420 or rdoepke@newground.com.