Advisor360 Leadership & Management

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced?

Dale Carnegie once said, “Give someone a great reputation to live up to.” What this basically means is that you sometimes have to put people in roles which they are not fully comfortable with or maybe not 100 percent ready for, but you know they’ll be great at it over time. In Advisor360 engineering, we’ve practiced that over and over again. We’ve made multiple organization adjustments over time and placed people in new roles — both leadership and individual contributors — and when we did that, we made sure everyone knew the new leaders and individual contributors are going to be great at this role, even before they started. We explained why we did the change, what made them right for this role and what we expect them to do over time. This shows the team we have internal mobility, we grow our people, and we try to make sure people have the opportunity to learn new things and get out of their comfort zone.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

Our emphasis on leveraging AI to deliver business value is getting the team excited. While we’re on the front, the team is aware that there are still deliveries that are needed in order to support the existing customer base and keep moving our platform forward. This kind of work is usually more of the “business as usual” kind of work, but the teams know that the more we deliver on our existing commitments, the more we can shift into AI. We’re already using AI internally, and we’ve proven adoption is rising by looking at the engagement scores of our AI tools. On the application side, we’ve used UX research and demos to show the news capabilities we’re building are going to solve real business needs and use AI to make financial advisors more efficient in their work and as a result be able to serve their customers better and acquire more new customers.

The Rituals That Keep Priorities and Expectations Clear on Shay Harel’s Team at Advisor360

• “All-hands meetings: In my all-hands, I’m always making sure we go from the ‘why’ to the ‘what’ and then to the ‘how.’ The team understands the company’s strategy, why we do certain things, how the team’s deliverables fit into the strategy, etcetera. In the end, I’m tying it all up with explicit and ordered priorities for the next quarter. I explain to the team why some things make the top priorities and why some don’t. I'm also making sure we refer to the priorities from last quarter to see if anything is shifting and show that we have an overall stable priority list that does not shift every quarter.”
• “KPIs: KPIs are great to keep the team accountable. We track KPIs at my staff level and go over them on a monthly basis. My leadership team commits to certain KPIs which will move the needle on a set of given business aspects, and then we set goals for the end of the year with specific KPI values the team has to meet every month. The KPIs can be going down (reduce customer issues), going up (increase test coverage) or stay flat (zero critical security bugs open over 30 days). My staff then propagate these KPIs to their teams.”

As director of engineering at Advisor360°, I collaborate across different layers of the organization with an objective to ensure that we are aligned and everyone is moving in the same direction. As such, I collaborate with the engineering peers and cross-functional leads to build alignment and standards across the organization.