Star manager or Team-based culture? Asset managers often obsess about how they wish the world to view them. This is understandable given, that like any business, they rely for their success on building and maintaining a strong brand in the minds of their customers. And frequently the strength of this brand is assumed to rest significantly on the perceived importance of fund management professionals.
Focusing on the merits of one versus the other can seem like so much wasted effort when it would appear that be they “Star” or “Team” organisations, asset managers worry in equal measure when such professionals are poised to depart the business. This is when we observe the client communication machine clicking into overdrive with a careful plan tailored to minimise potential brand and customer confidence damage.
Research informs us that such a reaction is normally out of proportion to how clients actually view the importance of such matters. They understand that the organisations supplying services to them are constantly evolving, which necessitates personnel arrivals and departures. It is only when events occur calling into question the vision, philosophy or effectiveness of business process that client concerns may emerge.
The question is, do we in our individual businesses understand what really matters to clients when they interact with us and more importantly, do we have a reliable picture of how we are measuring up? As experienced professionals, we are likely to have a reasonable idea of what matters to our customers, but we should want to set the knowledge bar a little higher than that. However, the answer to the second part of the above question is considerably more challenging, for very often we may lack the tools and skills necessary to accurately discover how we are scoring. Sometimes we may also lack the courage, to paraphrase Robert Burns, “To (want to) see ourselves as others see us”.
The most important consideration from our clients’ perspective is unlikely to be the personnel issues surrounding who their fund manager or fund management team is today or is likely to be tomorrow. If we were to seek their views, our research suggests that customers would want us to focus on the factors that could fundamentally alter their client experience, or more importantly what they expect it might be in the future.
Arguably, we should commit to devoting as much resource and imagination into the examination of these issues, as we seem to do continually and usually reactively to issues involving fund management personnel.
