Week 4: Solving Problems/Improving

Over the past few weeks I have been able to sit each day on the trading floor surrounded by the Wealth Planning Sales team and the Financial Planning group. Their desks are all lined up so the two teams work closely together. Between the teams there needs to be a lot of collaboration because the financial planning group puts together the financial plans and the WPS team has to “sell” them to the Financial advisor to give advice to the client. However, through my observations I have noticed that the Financial Planning team and the Sales team have very different personalities and they don’t exactly work seamlessly together. Bonnie is the manager/leader for the FP team and has an entirely different leadership style than Andrew, who is the head of the WPS team. Bonnie calls her team in frequently for check in meetings or has everyone meet in the middle of the desks to break down phone calls or strategies they might be implementing. Andrew on the other hand, rarely seems to check in with his team as a collective  unit. From what I have noticed, Andrew is very hands off in his approach to working with the rest of his team, but when they come to him he is helpful and knows what he’s talking about.

I sat down and had a meeting with a woman named Debra who works on the WPS team under Andrew and described my observations of the two teams and their different leaders, and to my surprise, she defended Andrew’s style and provided me with a different perspective on his style. Many people make fun of him or don’t seem to take him very seriously as a leader, but she said that he’s been working in his position as a manager for over ten years and that he’s good at it, even though it doesn’t seem like he’s doing much. Whereas Bonnie is younger and less experienced managing a larger team, so she is more proactive to make sure she’s doing everything right. However, I have been told that the two teams could work better together because a lot of their meetings don’t always run as effectively as they could. I think a possible solution to this problem is to remove the two teams from the workplace and spend some time together outside of the formal work setting to get to know each other better. Another smaller solution would be to have more formal agendas so that Andrew and the WPS team don’t go off tangent and detract from the productivity of the meeting. I’m excited to observe the two teams more closely and see what exactly is the cause of their inability to work efficiently together.