Robin Kingsmill has learned that running a successful team is a balance between rigidity and flexibility.
The senior vice president and investment advisor with Toronto-based BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. in Mississauga, Ont., has learned to remain firm in the goals she sets for her team, yet flexible in allowing each team member to find the best way to attain them.
Kingsmill’s team manages $160 million in assets for 300 client households. The team consists of Kingsmill, a sales assistant, an investment advisor and an associate investment advisor — all women.
One factor that has kept the team successful — including through the recent recession — is that Kingsmill has allowed each team member to expand on her role as she sees fit. So, although Kingsmill may hire a sales assistant for administrative tasks, she is open to letting that person develop other skills.
“It’s part of my job as a leader,” Kingsmill says, “to get people to feel comfortable enough that their unique ability starts to come to the surface.”
For example, when Kingsmill hired Susan Taptelis as a sales assistant in 1995, Kingsmill expected the new recruit to remain in that role. But as the years passed, Taptelis took an interest in the investment side of the business and began to take courses. She eventually obtained the qualifications to become an associate broker and began executing trades.
Over the past 20 years, Kingsmill herself has been driven to succeed as an investment advisor. Since joining Nesbitt in the early 1990s, she has achieved the elite Chairman’s Council and President’s Club distinctions.
Before becoming a financial advisor, Kingsmill began a career in sales with Xerox Canada in 1981. She found that job restricting; she disliked the idea of having a specific geographical territory. “If you want to sell something,” she says, “you need to pick something that allows you to pick your own audience.”
Kingsmill joined her father, who was working as a broker with Toronto-based Merrill Lynch Canada Inc., in 1987. It was under her father’s wing that she began to specialize, focusing on fixed-income securities while her father continued to sell higher-risk stocks to clients. “I discovered that the difference between what I did and what he did,” she says, “was like night and day.”
In 1988, Kingsmill moved, with her father’s team, over to Nesbitt, setting up shop in Mississauga. Throughout the 1990s, Kingsmill began to add people to the team and create more specialized roles. Prior to 1990, she had a sales assistant who dealt with both administrative tasks and broker duties. But as the branch’s business grew, Kingsmill was able to expand the team to divide that position into two separate roles.
• Top Advisor Summit: The art of team leadership
Robin Kingsmill, an advisor and SVP at BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., in Mississauga, Ont., discusses how she chooses roles for her team members and how her leadership skills have developed with experience and coaching. WATCH
@page_break@Up until that point, Kingsmill had been a process-driven leader. She was concerned with an assistant’s ability to complete his or her duties as well as how he or she completed the task. She experienced a profound revelation as a leader when a sales assistant called her a “tyrant.”
“I was perplexed and I didn’t really understand what she meant,” Kingsmill says. “As leaders, we don’t realize the effect we have on others when we are very demanding.”
When Kingsmill enrolled in a workshop with Toronto-based Strategic Coach, she understood that she needed to change. Using a tool called “positive focus,” Kingsmill learned to concentrate on the results of her team’s work rather than micromanaging how they achieved them.
To maintain that positive focus, Kingsmill now holds weekly team meetings, in which each member shares three things she has done really well in the past week.
“When I listened, I learned that people were doing things that I knew nothing about,” Kingsmill says. “I developed more respect for their capabilities and I recognized that we, as a team, would be better off if I got out of the way.”
To achieve positive focus, you need to understand that running a team is like asking five people how they would each go about washing the dishes. One person might organize them according to size first, while another person might wash them according to how recently they were used. “The main thing is to get out of their way and let them just do it,” Kingsmill says. “They might surprise you.”
That surprise came to Kingsmill when Taptelis’s son fell ill. Although Kingsmill expected Taptelis to take a few days off of work, she bought a computer so that she could complete trades at home.
Kingsmill says there is a “science” to being a leader. That involves developing a systematic program of rewards for positive contributions. On Kingsmill’s team, the reward is recognition and a bigger piece of the group’s profit pie.
Giving team members free rein over how they carry out their roles is not without obstacles.
“The biggest challenge people have to creating a successful team is themselves,” Kingsmill says. “Some people can’t accept that others think differently. I really have to be careful I don’t tell people how to do things.”
IE