YOUR CHOICE April 2006 By Alicia Teo
THE NEXT WAVE OF LEADERSHIP
As baby boomers exit the workforce to pave the way for the next generation workforce, companies should now look at the next wave as we proceed on our journey of leadership in the 21 st century. When we refer to “The next wave” I believe it refers to the next wave of leadership development where training will be on a different footing.
It is in this context that I have decided to organize together with my colleague a Conference on “The Next Wave of Leadership” to hear what our top business leaders have to say. It has been an honor for us for these top business leaders to allow us the opportunity to publish a book that comprises their challenges, their passion, their plans for succession planning, their grooming strategies for the next generation leaders and their perspective of the next wave of leadership. It is to be priced at $25 a book and we hope to see you there at the launch. In my last issue I published on the Pillars of Leadership. But in this issue I like to focus on the next wave.
My perspective of the next wave of leadership is within the six pillars:
a) Passion
I had the privilege of interviewing a young and dynamic 25-year old Prudential’s top performer, Merry Riana, for this issue’s cover story which fits my profile of the next wave of leadership. When I first started to organize the Conference on “The Next Wave of Leadership”, I have been advised by the Editorial Panel to get young entrepreneurs to speak since it is talking about the next wave. But I have decided otherwise. I felt it would be good if we get the top business leaders who have ‘been there done that’ to share their journey in the book and present their paper for the conference delegates on their perspective of the next wave to encourage aspiring young leaders to move onto the next wave of leadership.
I guess I was on the right path as I happened to meet Merry Riana. Her outstanding achievements at the tender age of 25 suit perfectly my cover story on “The Next Wave of Leadership”.
Whilst drinking my cold chocolate on a hot Saturday afternoon, I found out that she was the winner of two awards from Prudential Assurance in the year 2005 – the Top Agency of the Year Award (Financial Services Manager category) and the Top Rookie Agency Award, an award given to the top manager within the 1 st year of agency management.
It was indeed a remarkable achievement for a young lady who has just established her agency 2 years ago.
These were not the first awards Merry Riana has received. In the year 2003, when she was just 23, she clinched the Top New Adviser Award for her solid performance for the year. On top of that, she was also featured in the Straits Times, as Prudential’s top producer. So, not only did Merry win the Top New Adviser Award, but she was also the agent with the highest sales volume and with the most number of new clients in Prudential that year. Subsequently Merry Riana was promoted to become a Manager, in just 15 months after joining the company.
Indeed, it was really an accelerated success.
Her journey
Merry Riana comes from an average income family and had to raise $40,000 loan to study in the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to pursue the bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Electrical Engineering. She graduated in the year 2002 and in the midst of her studies she found that she could not see herself fit into the corporate world environment. Her desire is to excel and be successful when she is young and not when she reaches the age of 35-40. Moreover, joining the corporate world after graduation would mean that she will have to take a longer time to pay off her study loan of $40,000.
As a student, she tried many types of businesses that would help her to fulfill her dream within a short span of time. With the money that her mother sent from Indonesia, she invested in stocks and shares with some friends but soon found that it was not her call. She lost all her savings in the process and for a student, losing $10,000 savings is devastating. It’s devastating even to an adult, more so to a student.
After a thorough study of the market, she decided to go into the insurance industry even though she knows the path would not be easy. However, with the passion within her to help others and be an impact to their lives, and her perception that an insurance career has an unlimited growth, she decided to join the insurance industry after graduation.
When she first joined the industry, she was concerned and wondered if she could ever make it as it is not an easy industry especially when more than 50% of the Singapore market is Mandarin speaking and she herself could not speak Mandarin. She also had to compete with big players who have more than 20-30 years of experience. However, she decided that she should not focus on her limitations. She started to share about the benefits of insurance to the passer-by on the street and even strangers in the bus or MRT and found that people are open to her sharing. From then onwards, things have not been the same for Merry Riana. It was indeed a breakthrough for her. Business keeps flowing in like rivers of living water and today she is proud to lead a team of 30 insurance advisers all around her age group, 21-30 years old. Within the first 6 months of her career with Prudential, she cleared her debts of $40,000 out of her own earnings from the company, something she would never have been able to achieve if she works in the corporate world, as a common engineer or accountant.
In the year 2003 she won the prestigious Top New Adviser Award and in the year 2004 she was promoted to be a Manager.
We are entering the next wave of leadership where top performers are now not the very experienced but the very young who has the vision, the passion and the drive towards success. One main key is evolved around the word “Focus”.
Her vision
There is a common saying that without vision people perish. Merry Riana feels that raising up and building an organization of young people and helping them achieve financial independence, doing what they love to do and living their dreams should be the vision of the next wave of leadership.
This vision must be accompanied with the means of fulfilling the goal to ensure they do not forget to share their fruits with those around them, especially their parents and immediate families.
It is this vision and her passion that have made her to be one of the top performers in the insurance industry in these past few years.
Keys to Merry Riana’s success
b) Creating a Learning Environment
Today, there is a tendency towards the emphasis of the softer side of learning. Merry Riana feels the returns on investment on face-to-face coaching and personal mentorship far excels distance learning which has no residual impact although companies are investing significant capital in distance learning and training software to try to facilitate this type of learning. More often than not, returns on soft learning investment often is difficult to justify. It is for this reason that Merry Riana chooses to train her team on a relationship basis. All she needs is only the investment of her time, the returns of which is immense as evidenced from the achievement the team made last year.
E-training no doubt gets the employees tested and passes (or gets certified) but the cost of delivery is not effective as the course is often placed on the shelf until such time when it is needed.
The more middle management understands the impact and context of the transactions in which they are involved, the more inclined they become to learn about the rest of the enterprise.
c) Visibility
Many companies make a critical mistake by assuming that middle managers should be constrained to their specific area of the business, rather than gain a greater understanding of the business as a whole. Merry Riana’s view is that fuller understanding and share vision of the organization can be achieved only through personal mentorship.
Personal Mentorship
It is important to let the members of your team feel important. A binding relationship is important. It is for this reason that Merry Riana sets aside her time every week for a personal coaching with her team members and monitoring their progress to ensure that their goals are translated into sales.
She feels a binding relationship will help her and her team to achieve their goals. Any relationships that sap your energy should be avoided. To help attain your goals, you have to have a replenishment relationship – one where people energize and vitalize you just by being with them. They add to your life in a positive way and one of the best ways to draw people like this is to be the kind of person who helps others to achieve by being with them, holding hands with them and saying “together we achieve”. But to do this, you have to be the person they want you to be that draws their enthusiasm. Quality relationship is important in helping one achieves the goal.
This is seen in Merry Riana’s style of personal mentorship through a comment made by the top new adviser in Merry’s team, Maple Ng, 24, “Merry’s genuine concern and care for her advisers extend beyond work matters. More than a manager, she is a close friend whom I can confide to as she is quick to listen and slow to judge and always committed to help. Merry is definitely every adviser’s dream manager!”
(ii) Grooming skills – She believes in leading the team more than managing them and to do this, you need to lead by example and through being with them all the time and showing them the ropes of the business by directly being involved and working together with them to clinch deals that is important. She believes in grooming a young and dynamic team and carefully selects the cream of people to mentor. Her present team comprises mainly of people within her age group and who are diploma holders or degree holders. Her criteria for a potential candidate to join the team are (a) to have the willingness to work hard, (b) to have the discipline to keep on pushing-on, and (c) to have the teachability to continue to learn to do the right thing.
She ensures she upgrades herself and set higher standards all the time. She believes very much in continuously learning even if she reaches the top of the achievement ladder. She attends good seminars on leadership, read books on leadership and learns as she interacts with other business people and gurus in leadership.
And having learnt all these, she always passes down all her skills, knowledge and experience to her people. As the top adviser in Merry’s team, Dwi, 23, said: “Merry is my model of excellence. She let me learn the skills in the fastest possible way by letting me to model exactly after her. Not only I am fortunate that I am able to model her sales and leadership skills, but I also aspire to model after her hard work, passion, and courage.”
(iii) Team Work – Her strong belief that sales is not an individual effort but a well-coordinated team effort has also been a contributing effort to spurring her even more towards grooming her people to success. “When you have a team,” she said, “they will also lift you up during your ‘down periods’.”
Her efforts in grooming her team has not been in vain. Some of the team members have made it to the managerial level and this alone is a testimony of her skills in grooming.
Joanne Chen, 24, the top manager in Merry’s team supported this fact: “Always a smile on her face, always there whenever you need her, is how I will remember and introduce my dearest mentor & manager to my own advisers. There could be a better name for her…Merry, always.”
While the old age method of mentorship of leaders in the 1950’s up to 1980’s seems to be the same as those in the 21 st century, it is not the same. The next wave of leadership focuses on leading and relationship building whereas those of the 50’s to 80’s focus on managing and expecting people to take orders without question.
(d) Communication and Information Dissemination
Merry Riana’s synergy of personal mentorship is based on three elements – VISION followed by ACTION and this is made possible by PASSION.
Middle managers who realize the importance of translating ideas into action can benefit from a common and clear understanding of the relationship between decisions made at the highest levels and the impact those decisions have down on the floor level. It is about creating a shared view of the organization – one in which managers have better visibility into the impact of their activity as it relates to their peer’s activity. Many companies are uncomfortable with the sharing of strategic information and it should be the mission of the leader to breakdown this mistrust and find the mechanism best suited to disseminate it. Many companies know the importance of this knowledge of communication but fails in many respects to communicate it effectively. Somewhere down the line it gets disintegrated. It is for this reason that Merry Riana finds it a joy to be with her team all the time to ensure the right message is transmitted.
(e) Building a Culture of Trust & Integrity
Middle managers should be empowered to perform their jobs and manage their teams in support of the goals of the organization. But too often, managers are not connected closely enough to those same goals, lacking the context to operate around them.
When the team feels they can truly impact the business, they re-commit themselves to the goals of the organization. Flowing strategy down to the tactical level motivates your middle managers and builds trust by connecting them more closely to the business. Merry Riana realizes the importance of this trust and inculcates in them that integrity always pays in the long run as sincerity and integrity builds trust within everyone in her Organization and consequently attracts more potential candidates to join them in their expansion and growth.
(f) Monitoring Growth and Leadership
Merry Riana’s system of monitoring growth and leadership is never on an annual performance review basis. It will be too late by then. If she adopts this system, she would not have achieved the goal, especially when during the first half of last year, they only achieved $300,000 for their sales turnover. It is through this monitoring growth and leadership system of reviewing regularly that helps them to bag the prestigious Top Rookie Agency Award and to end the year with a sales turnover of 7 times higher that their mid-year result. For Merry Riana, monitoring growth regularly is of paramount importance unlike most bosses who see annual reviews as a painful administrative burden rather than an opportunity for discovery and improvement.
Her motivational forces
Her motivational forces come from her desire to provide a better life for her parents & family and her passion to mentor as many young individuals as possible to achieve their own successes while they are still young.
Next wave of leadership
Her perspectives of the next wave of leadership are:
Overcoming her challenges
She is aware of challenges all the time and she knows that without failure you can never achieve success but you must learn from the failure and not to repeat the same mistake. Basing on her first failure in the stock market during her school time that caused her to lose $10,000 and her team’s performance for the first half of last year that caused her to almost lose her award were lessons she learnt from the challenges. You should always move forward and not take past glory for granted.
Beyond business
She goes for outing with her team of 30 members and exercises together once a month. In this way, there is a bonding between their relationships. She grounds them on the importance of unity. Without unity there are no blessings. Once a week, she conducts sales training and every week she reviews the results of their action. Every Monday is a power session with the team and daily she is with them helping them overcome the challenges of difficult customers. This has resulted in developing a closer and covenantal relationship with each other.
She has the following marketing tips to encourage our readers:
Marketing Tips
Commitment of Contribution
Merry Riana believes in contributing back to society. So, for this year, she has made a commitment to set aside 2 hours of her precious time every week, to mentor any young person who wants to learn from her experiences.
As all of her team members have benefited greatly from her personal mentorship, she really hopes that this special 2 hours mentoring sessions every week will touch more hearts and change more lives, especially for the young generation out there.
So, if you’re interested to take charge of your destiny, lead a successful & fulfilling life while providing a better life for your parents & family, this is definitely an opportunity that you will not want to miss.
To know more about Merry Riana and her Organization, MRO, you can visit www.merryriana.com.sg or email merry@merryriana.com.sg.
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