guides everything we do. Every decision is made, and every action is done, through the lens of our purpose. It's our “why.” It reinforces the notion that our firm does not exist only to help people build wealth. We're more than that. We help people achieve things they might never have otherwise thought possible. We help them connect to their own purpose and bring it to life. Our purpose is the wellspring of our culture, leadership, business strategy, capabilities approach, and operating model. It demands that there be a logical connection among all those dimensions of our approach to growth and innovation.
For us to be able to serve our purpose throughout our second century in business as well as we did during our first, we must transform. Our purpose demands it.
It's equally important that our transformation be leader-led. Our leaders need to live and champion the mindsets needed for our transformation to succeed—their habits of thought and action need to always be in alignment with our goals and our desire to fulfill our purpose. But you don't just “tell” someone about this. Living it out, together, through shared experiences and a journey of discovery and learning, unleashes an ardor for the future that inspires leaders to engage others as they navigate the uncertainty of changing and learning. It's challenging, but it's worth it—the opportunity cost of not changing, of not adapting to the forces impacting our industry and our business, is too high.
How We're Transforming
As we build on our history and pivot toward the future, the conditions are right for our transformational journey. And we're once again working to stay ahead of the conditions of the stakeholders we seek to serve—the changing needs of investors, a new regulatory environment and pricing and competition pressures, the demands of talented associates, and the needs of our communities in order to be places where people can thrive.
Choosing not to change in our circumstances is also a fixed-mindset approach—and we're choosing to take a growth-mindset approach. That's critical to creating future innovation, staying relevant, and enhancing value to our clients, colleagues, and communities.
Exploring approaches like Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking has proven useful to us in our transformation, as these concepts have helped us recognize what vertical change might look like at the level of processes and operations. In that respect, they really can be quite powerful. The Seven Crucial Conversations referenced in this book, however, are designed to enact vertical change at the level of the social system itself. Resolving constraints at the social-system level is a unique and powerful type of transformation accelerator—the kind that has the potential to move an entire enterprise forward.
Perhaps the hardest part in any transformation is knowing where to start. It can feel like a daunting task, especially for a large, complex organization. It's too easy to start with the “whats” of change—what systems, what process, what talent, what technology. Importantly, Richard and the Growth River team helped us identify a strong starting point—with leadership and with culture, where a deeper understanding of and alignment around the need for transformation must take root and be shared. As Richard himself describes it, “Leadership and cultural agility are the launchpad for all successful transformational change journeys.”
Once that learning culture is well established, then an organization and its leaders are able to move onto clarifying roles and identifying the capabilities the organization needs to develop—or not. Only at this stage can leaders begin the work of connecting the right people with the right work and giving them clear accountabilities and responsibilities.
From there, the transformation can progress to establishing strategies and building the right customer experience—which in turn accelerates the organization's ability to activate the operating system of developing, selling, and delivering its product or service within the context of the company's unique competitive advantage.
On paper, this all sounds straightforward, doesn't it? But believe me, in practice, it's not. The work of getting through this progression is the messy middle that requires equal parts IQ and EQ—knowledge and empathy—for the transformation to succeed. It also helps to have a good dose of stubborn determination to journey on through the learning.
In our case, we made significant changes to the structure and style of our leadership. We moved from a top-down directive leadership style to a distributed leadership approach in which we've spread decision-making out across a number of groups—seeking to put decisions closest to where value is created. This approach creates a team-based way of working that's supported by functional areas and is fueled by distributed intelligence and innovation.
Specifically, the most fundamental change we've made is to alter our leadership structure. Previously, we had two committees, an Executive Committee and a Management Committee, through which every major decision was funneled. Now we have a series of forums, each with their own clear roles. This revised structure allows us to move decision-making closer to those who are directly responsible for the work, and ultimately closer to our branch teams and clients.
In this new format, leadership is distributed; each forum comprises a group of leaders responsible for solving the complex challenges we face as an organization. And because different people are responsible for different aspects of our complexity, we have to trust each other. And we do. In that way, team-based leadership is clearly a journey into the interior of each leader, and the alignment of each of those humans to the worthy ambition of the entire enterprise.
Within these forums, the job of leadership is to create alignment—which is not the same as creating agreement. Alignment requires that all participants in the adaptive social system choose to move in the direction of growth. The key is being adaptive and always pointing to growth and innovation—not stagnating around yesterday's value, but discerning tomorrow's value and organizing to create it in sustainable ways that are fit for market.
The key for us will be to ensure that everyone in the Edward Jones organization—all 50,000 of our associates, including me—is going full-out in their role. Transformation is hard; it takes all of us pulling in the same direction. None of us has the luxury of sitting back and allowing “others” to do the heavy lifting. Each of us gets to be an active participant.
That approach is one that must take root at the senior leadership level first, and from there, it can make its way through the entire organization. Our leaders set the example and actively help others develop the mindsets and behaviors we all need to orient ourselves and enhance our ability to live out our shared purpose. We are the “lid” on our organization's success and growth. Whatever becomes available to us in our learning journey and our relationships becomes available to everyone else. It's how we lift the lid and enable our organization to achieve more. (The opposite is also true—if we can't build healthy, productive interdependencies among us in leadership, no one else should be expected to either.)
Growth River's Valuable Contribution
As we've embarked on our transformational journey, the Growth River team has played a fundamental role in the work we've done. I often refer to them as our Sherpas on our path to becoming a high-performing organization. That's because, while they guide us and provide much-needed expertise and perspective, the work is still ours to lead and to own. Richard and his team have consulted with us, but they have also deeply engaged with our teams, offering feedback and truly being in it with us.
Growth River's core tenet, that teams and organizations can achieve so much more than individuals can on their own, is one we fully believe in. The people of Edward Jones create more positive impact for our clients, colleagues, and communities when we're all pulling in the same direction. The Seven Crucial Conversations help us work in a social system and help us move with more agility and confidence as we continue to transform over time.
I consider Richard to be more than a consultant; he's a friend and a fellow traveler on the road to make businesses more useful to all our stakeholders. I'm honored that he asked me to share my thoughts about his approach. I hope his ideas are helpful to you as you consider your own steps toward transformation and work toward unleashing the potential of your organization—and