Beyond the Comfort Zone: High Performers confronting change and automation

Whilst we’re big fans of small incremental changes (that’s what the Kaizen management philosophy is all about after all), often we kick off our work on a financial advice business with transformative change.

Transformative change can indeed be scary. It can mean whole business processes can change, things you did and checked are now just… done, you don’t have to remember certain things anymore, things that people said were important a year ago are no longer important, and much more. It can be eerie.

One challenge with transformative change (such as sweeping automation) is the greater potential for negative outcomes. As such, it’s even more important than usual to look at potential problems from every angle.

Whilst change management impacts all team members, counter-intuitively we frequently find high-performers are sometimes the most hesitant about change and concerned about what it means for them. In this article, we will focus on their angle when we consider the impact of transformative change.

Whether you’re a team member with an ill-defined general sense of anxiety about change, or a leader who feels someone in your team may be feeling uncertain about some upcoming change, this is a love letter to you.

To the managers ensuring their top performers know they’re being looked after, to ensure everyone stands to gain from change, the true leaders.

To the high-performers, to the ones who know their processes, to the ones who have honed their skills, the killer do-ers.

This one is for you guys.

We’ll cover why it’s an understandable (and often unforeseen) sensation, how we see transformation impacting team members in financial advice in practice, some dangers, and how to address these problems for both decision-makers and those impacted by those decisions.

Han Solo on how it feels when organisations seek to get a whole lot thinner.

What type of transformative change

When delving into transformative change within financial advice practices, we’re essentially talking about a comprehensive overhaul that touches every aspect of how practices operate. These can manifest practically in changes to what we do, when we do it, how much we charge, what we do for the fees we charge, what software we use daily, who does work, who checks work, how work is tracked. It can be a lot.

The array of disconcerting things that can happen can include:

Strategic change; such as a narrowing of business focus, removing unnecessary steps, consolidating (or less commonly compartmentalising) functions, redesigning of client journeys.
Engaging digitally; providing the choice to use self-serve options like scheduling tools, capturing client data digitally, or providing information via secure client portals where clients engage without us knowing.
Switching technologies, behind the scenes technology may be changed out for something more effective or fit for purpose which was at least well understood being replaced with something new.
Automating, outsourcing, offshoring, and robotics; all have the same effect: Something someone was once paid to do is done by someone/something else, unnerving even if you didn’t like doing it.

When we do work that may involve leveraging artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, or smart templates, change can come on suddenly.

Team members understandably focused on their own day-to-day output or who are still recovering from the latest round of dizzying financial advice regulatory changes may not see change coming.

Impact on high performers

Some of the most affected team members can be those high performers whom:

Excel in their current role; and
Don’t have a strong ambition or clear view of what their next role may be.

Such high performers may be great at the job in front of them. They may be great at reactionary work, they’re great at repetitive work, and good at being proactive in their domain of expertise.

High performers aren’t always ambitious ladder climbers, they’re good at what they do and are comfortable doing it.

Aside: High performers as a source for innovation and improvement ideas.

Fun fact: When we survey staff on what could be done to improve their role, these high performers don’t often bring great ideas. They’ve got what they need to perform the role they have very well.

They will also have long-overcome frustrations and employ an admirable mindset of getting on with the job without raising problems (or opportunities for improvement) more than once.

Counterintuitively, lower performers in the same role or with less experience often bring many more good ideas for process improvement, especially if they feel they could be doing better.

As a result, it can be a mistake to only invite your highest individual performer into collaboration or innovation sessions as the representative for their role. You can miss out on rich sources of innovation if that high performer hasn’t at the very least brought the ideas and suggestions of their peers.

These high performers are invaluable to an organisation, but may be the most apprehensive about change. Why?

It’s extremely critical to communicate to your employees exactly why the move to Robotic Process Automation is being made. It gives them a sense of belonging, instead of feeling isolated, to know how exactly it will interact with our strategy and also their job.
Head of employee proposition in a financial services firm, cited in Forrester Consulting’s ‘The Impact Of RPA On Employee Experience’ for UiPath, 2019, p8

What causes this impact?

Sense of self relative to peers

This could be a great case of impostor syndrome. If you’re underconfident, you stick to what you’re good at. Confidence may be founded presently in ability relative to peers.

Someone who has good attention to detail compared to their peers, may feel their value is diminished when software will attend to detail for you.
Someone who has a killer memory for client details and was the ‘go to’ person if a file was missing something, may feel their value is diminished when the file is always up to date and easily accessible.
Someone whose strengths lie in conversing with and building relationships with clients, may feel they’ll lack the chance to build those bonds if those opportunities are taken away.
Someone who is the lead for what stage any client may be up to in a workflow may feel they’re not as important if anyone can access that information in a click.

If transformative change or automation is going to take away what makes you so good and why your peers look up to you, that might create a sense of dread.

High-performers who were extremely practiced at a process may not just feel they have something to lose, they may also feel they have less to gain. When you can pump out work in 1/3 of the time of your peers, removing that step can present as 1/3 of the value to you when compared to peers, and flattens your relative value.

As such, high performers have more to lose than their less effective peers.

Sense of self relative to team

At the team level, this may be a lack of clear next steps for advancement. A lack of career conversations, or a lack of inspiration of ambition.

If you don’t know what else you’d do, transforming what you do currently doesn’t sound like it has a whole lot of upside.

This can be particularly sensitive in small businesses, where advancement isn’t obvious due to their being only a few team members or the other roles are radically different.

Without this, high performers may not have much to gain.

Sense of purpose for the business

Bringing transformative change back to what it’s trying to achieve, is more the goal. ‘Working smarter, not harder’ makes sense only if you know what you’re working for. ‘Leveraging technologies to build efficiency’ only makes sense when you’re clear on what the efficiencies are for.

This is worse when processes and effectiveness of the business has festered for a long time, the business has suffered from bad or chaotic decision making, or many initiatives have been tried and failed.

This baggage creates disillusionment and disengagement. If the business is chaotically just chucking ideas at the wall in a bid to reduce costs or to try and deliver some vague promise of ‘everything will be right if I can just find the right tech and pay for the license’, it’s easy to lose a sense of purpose.

For a disengaged staff member who is paid a pure salary, efficiencies don’t create an upside. Once again, the high performer doesn’t have much to gain here.

Other factors

This is a complicated area, and whilst the above are worth consideration there may be any number of challenges that present in engaging each individual complicated human being.

A handful of other ones that can come into play in particular for high performers are:

Undervaluing one’s own capability and the value of one’s own time.
Uncertainty as we move from a domain with known excellence to a new one without a sure footing.
Concerns about the ability to learn new skills. (“I’m an old dog now… I can’t learn new tricks like I used to.”)
Anxiety over performance monitoring.
Not being able to talk to people and make connections.
Being required to talk to people and make connections even more. (<- It can cut both ways, although this one terrifies me personally)

How to address this impact

To summarise the above, high performers may perceive they have little to gain and a lot to lose.

Granted, typically, high performers aren’t self-centred idiots. They are aware there is a big picture, they will change when asked and understand that’s inevitable to a degree, but they still can be uncertain about change.

As a manager, we don’t want a high performer on the bench when it comes to change management, we want the whole team to be engaged with change. As such, we need to highlight the benefits and provide reassurance regarding perceived drawbacks.

As an individual, you need to ensure that you can benefit from the change and ensure you aren’t left behind to experience any potential drawbacks.

Highlight the benefits

Addressing benefits for high performers as individuals

Transformative process improvement typically includes some examples of benefits that focus on the individual, such as:

Allowing for less interesting and more repetitive functions to be replaced with functions that require critical thinking and judgement.
Creating more time to call clients, keep good records, be proactive, and do other things you feel you should do but don’t have time for.
Creating the breathing room for high performers to rise above being the best of peers, and genuinely develop.

Addressing benefits for high performers as members of a team

At the team level, there needs to be some scope for development.

This could be promotion, projects, oversight of team in a more supervisory function (something that becomes more possible as automation and technology usually provide new scope for reporting and problem identification), could be enabling role growth for administrators to develop into more associate type functions.

Either way, there needs to be space for benefits to be taken advantage of and clarity around what they could be.

Automation can also give staff members chances to advance their careers by taking on more strategic responsibilities or working on creative projects. Organizations may empower people and increase their engagement in an automated world by investing in learning and skill development.
Quixy, Finding Harmony Between Automation & Employee Engagement, 2023

You can see a couple of examples from our work by expanding the below.

Example 1: When supervisors just do and have no time to supervise

A larger financial advice team with multiple people in the same role constantly requires the most senior or capable person in a role to be on the tools, constantly working to keep up and fighting fires.

Through automation, this role was freed up to generate reporting, dissect reporting to identify issues before they become problematic, and identify opportunities to enhance efficiencies even further with continuous improvement of automations or procedures.

This high performer became more valuable than ever.

Example 2: When efficiencies create time and ability for vertical movement

A smaller financial advice team where many hats are worn get some significant automation in place. Prior to automation, there wasn’t enough hours in the day for the admin team to do anything more than what they had been.

However, when we looked at what else those existing team members could do with their time, we identified another opportunity.

By providing significant automation for the Record of Advice process, we didn’t just reduce the time required to prepare a Record of Advice but we reduced the technical knowledge required to do so. This allowed the new capacity in the admin team to free up paraplanning and the benefits to cascade up.

Addressing benefits for the business and its vision

Communicating a clear vision of the case for transformative change is one of the first steps of the Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change.

We can save time and reduce costs sounds valuable to those who benefit from those things, but aren’t tied to the vision of the business. They aren’t inherently motivating.

Consider the following simplified versions of what you could communicate.

Spending less time working for clients, so we can spend more time speaking to our clients.
Using technology so we can deliver to clients faster, and in line with their modern expectations.
Saving time on repetitive mindless work, so we can focus our big brains on doing what we enjoy most.
Working smarter, not harder, so we can make work easier every day. (More appropriate for teams who are overwhelmed presently, and this is an end in itself.)
We need to be more efficient if we’re to remain viable. (Yes, this is a scarier one and impresses the importance, although negative incentives are rarely as effective in the long term.)

A vision can have one reason or a few reasons for existing, but tying the goal back to the ‘why’ for the business will help get a better result.

If you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED Talk on how to ‘Start with why’, stop reading here and go watch that. My writing is brilliant, of course, but Simon Sinek’s concept on this is genius.

Providing reassurance of the drawbacks

Look to others

Looking close to home

Look to those who have done this before and are like you. These may be practices within your licensee, peers in an association, or friendly firms that are ahead on this front.

What did they do? Can you share those experiences? What are their high performers doing now instead? Could you ask them to share their own experiences with your team?

Looking further afield

In the previously referenced Forrester Consulting research, they looked at Robotic Process Automation, a technology designed to drive extensive automation which we’ve been working on with our leading firms. They asked:

When your organization implemented Robotic Process Automation, what benefits did the technology actually have on your employees?

They found they received:

Better customer service in 57% of respondents
Better employee engagement in 57% of respondents
Lower headcount in 37% of respondents

Yep, that does mean some lower headcount in a little over a third of cases, but much more benefits for customers and employee engagement.

Lean on experts

Feel free refer to experts in practice management within your licensee, refer to this article, or contact us to see if we can help.

To attest from our work over the last five years, as far as we know it has never directly led to a team member being made redundant. In small to medium businesses, good existing team members are too important. Instead, the outcome depends on the business.

For an overstretched business, it’s just recovery and a shift to improved sustainability. They return to where they should’ve been, not overstretched, just fully and appropriately resourced. This improves client retention and staff retention, which pays a very significant dividend. Even in this circumstance, it always leads to better client outcomes, more compliant outcomes, and improved team engagement.

For a business that was fully staffed, this may result in a new tilt towards new business where new business was stagnant. Or the efficiencies may be leveraged into an acquisition. For more about the power of being an efficient business when looking into acquisitions, you may enjoy our two-part series on acquisitions here.

Otherwise, this may remove the need to replace staff that leave. Attrition is normal, and provides an opportunity to leverage the benefits of efficiency. Whilst an existing experienced team member would likely be redeployed or redirected, it’s another thing to replace a staff member you may not need any longer.

One danger is that the investments lead to less work taking the same amount of time.

The duration of tasks expand to fill their allotted time spans, regardless of the amount of work to be done.
Parkinson’s Law

A focus on what’s important

It’s true that doing something prescriptive and repetitive has less value than ever. If that’s your speciality, and all you ever want to do, knowledge work will become a challenge for you at any organisation.

In place of the ability to do a repetitive task effectively, new skills are becoming increasingly valuable:

Breadth of knowledge, jacks of all trades are coming back as we still need people to know how everything works together.
Depth of knowledge, going beyond what we do and knowing why we do what we do is increasingly critical.
Personable and relatable, as automatable tasks are removed and devalued having emotional intelligence and being able to connect with clients will be more important than ever.

Returning the focus of what we as humans do on what we do best, helps position us all for the future.

Speaking with C-3PO is exhausting, even if you can do it in over six million forms of communication.

Better to talk to a human, like you.

You own the solution. Yes, you.

If you’re reading this as:

A manager, who thinks they can just forward this to a team member and think ‘They just need to think differently, that’ll fix it.’, you’re doing it wrong.
A high performing team member, who thinks this highlights all the things management are missing and they need to fix it, you’re doing it wrong.

Both ends of this transaction have a role to play, and either end can make a big difference.

If you’re a manager, you need lead the horse to water as much as possible and there is always more you can do. If you feel you’ve nailed all the aspects I’ve covered above, engaging high-performers is a journey that never ends.

Be that manager that leads, that helps their team to understand the change, make sure change works for all and it will work for the business as a matter of course.

Ensure all team members have something to gain and room to take advantage of the gain, and help them understand there is little if anything to lose.

If you’re a concerned team member, I’ve seen countless examples where bottom-up leadership or managing upwards have helped to drive better outcomes for individuals and the business around them. If you feel you’re perfect, and someone else is responsible for all of this, you’re very wrong. If you feel you can’t influence your own destiny within the organisation, that would be a rare outcome indeed.

Be that killer do-er, the one who’s on top of it all, just in a slightly new context. Keep on nailing it, and progressively nail it, without letting moving sands underfoot slow you down.

Ensure you take efficiencies and do more with your time, look for what new tools and change can offer, be aware of downsides and work to manage them while still moving forward.

I regularly see good managers work effectively despite challenges with their team, and good team members leverage outcomes despite ineffective management. Either can go a long way to solving problems in this space… and when both do well together… *Whisper voice* It’s magic.

If you want help with this, we help advisers and their practices do more, whatever the unique mix of issues may be. So if that’s you, Contact us and let’s have a chat.

If you’d like to make sure you never miss a beat, you can subscribe to our newsletter which rounds up the articles from each quarter. Just subscribe below.

Additional menu