How Future Advisory are achieving personal bests in the year of performance
“It took 2 years of resilient experimenting to find the ingredients to sustainable performance for our team. In the end, it just clicked”
This is how Jase described the journey to performance for his firm, Future Advisory, when I asked him how he felt the team was performing compared to this time last year. We often see firms really struggle to hit their straps in the first quarter of the financial year, balancing the frantic end in the lead-up to June 30 with taking the opportunity to jet away for well-earned holidays with family and friends. However, Future have bucked this trend as we near the end of Q1, and I was curious to hear how the team was able to achieve this.
The short answer, a combination of 5 pillars that Jase, Greg, Shelley and the team of nearly 30 individuals have been chipping away at for the last few years that have enabled the ‘click’ to occur.
5 Performance Shifts
- Self-autonomy and Trust
- Clear Targets and Expectations
- Cadence of Performance
- Monthly 1:1’s with Managers
- Client Focus and Confidence
These pillars have also led to some really tough decisions being made, particularly when it comes to performance and culture and the standards that they now are more confident and bold to hold each other to, and this starts with the Directors themselves being role models.
“We have got some really important people that are advising not only the Directors, but also the managers and the next wave of leaders coming through which is giving us the confidence to trust ourselves, and trust one another, knowing that we are in it together.”
One of the really interesting observations that Jase shared was that when the tough decisions were made to part ways with some employees, the appetite and drive for the team members to step up and take on more responsibility and grow into their next role was there in spades. This is something that caught Jase a little by surprise and led him to think he and the Directors could have made these so-called tough decisions far earlier.
One of the other design shifts that Future have made in the past 12 months has been the size of teams. They have intentionally designed teams of no more than 7 people, which is supported by extensive research. The larger team sizes were chewing up considerable amounts of time, particularly when WIP meetings would be including 12 people around the table / virtual meeting which meant that most of the time people were listening to others that they had very little to no cross over with.
And this is something that we can see in the data with some phenomenal result sets when comparing performance results between financial years:
“The monthly sessions we have with Everperform and the platform itself are invaluable to remind us that although on the scoreboard we might be performing well, there are always lead indicators that provide the Directors and Managers with actionable insights to execute on. These would otherwise be blind spots for us, and the fact we can have the proactive conversations we need to have with our people helps us sustain our performance levels before something breaks”
A really good example of this was one of the key players in the team, who was shooting the lights out on the productivity and billing scorecard, however, it was evident that they were on a continuous decline across the lead indicator categories, particularly energy, mindset and fulfilment. Based on this, it took a conversation instigated by Jase to agree that the best thing for them to do was to book a holiday, take some time away and recharge.
The result, they came back from holiday a rejuvenated version of their former self, the time and space away from work gave them the opportunity to assess and set some clear personal goals, and the performance profile for productivity and billing continued to rise in parallel. This is the perfect use case for how the holistic profile of performance is informing leaders and their people of what is really going on, and to act on the insights that can help people sustain performance and improve over time.
So onwards and upwards for Future Advisory as they embark on their next stage of high-performance growth with plenty more performance experiments, infrared saunas and ice-baths on the horizon.
