CEO Report: First Quarter
At Petersen Hastings we take our commitment to excellent service for our clients seriously. To fulfill our commitment, it is important to engage a talented team that embraces our mission and values. As part of this engagement, we undertook a firm wide strategy in 2017 to benchmark our practices with those recognized as top employers in our field to learn how we can continue to “raise the bar” as an employer. To learn where we stood nationally, we started by submitting an application to InvestmentNews, a national financial industry publication that created a process in 2018 to evaluate financial advisory firms as an employer. InvestmentNews realized that their specialty was financial news, not identifying best employer characteristics and engaged “Best Companies Group,” an organization specializing in identifying best employers for their process.
We were pleased to learn that in InvestmentNews’ inaugural year for this evaluation, Petersen Hastings was selected as one of the “Best Places to Work for Financial Advisors for 2018”! What we learned was that we already had in place at Petersen Hastings much of the criteria for being a best employer. We are pleased to announce that we are again one of “InvestmentNews Best Places to Work for Financial Advisors for 2019”! At Petersen Hastings, our mission and values are consistently applied in our daily activity. We know that words alone do not bring the mission and values alive in the workplace. It requires embracing the words and bringing them to life through our daily action. I am proud to say that our team demonstrates these characteristics and lives them each day at our company.
I enjoy reading biographies and autobiographies, especially the latest one by Howard Schultz titled, “From the Ground Up.” While I will refrain from any comments regarding the political components of the book, it was enlightening to me from a “best employer” perspective. My favorite quote from the book, originally from Professor Nancy Koehn — a historian, author, and lecturer at Harvard Business School — states, “Leaders are not born in some kind of lovely, shake-and-bake kind of way, or cut from the rib of Zeus. They are made and they allow themselves to be made and they participate in their own making… The path you walk is actually the best classroom you will ever find.”
If we apply what Professor Koehn suggested, Petersen Hastings needs to continually make sure it represents an ideal classroom where team members are and remain engaged in their growth. I believe we are doing this as represented by our recent recognition, as well as our regular “Gallup” engagement scores that measures how engaged our team members are in their growth at Petersen Hastings — from a team and individual perspective.
Why is this important to our clients? By taking great care of our team, they will in turn provide excellent service to our clients!