On January 1, 2019, I became the managing partner (as a private partnership, this is our corollary to a CEO) of Edward Jones—just the sixth one in our firm's 100-year history. The age and endurance of our firm is just one dimension of the moment we found ourselves in—we were a new leadership team, stewarding a storied company into the future.

Our firm was doing extremely well when I began my tenure. Edward Jones had experienced remarkable growth for decades. After starting with one financial advisor in 1922 and growing to 100 financial advisors in the early 1970s, the firm reached the milestone of 1,000 financial advisors in 1986, then added its 10,000th in 2008—and has nearly 19,000 financial advisors as I write this. In terms of number of financial advisors, we are one of the two or three largest firms today.

By almost any measure, the firm has been successful. Edward Jones is listed on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held financial services firm in the industry. We serve 7 million clients and care for $1.8 trillion of their assets as of the end of 2021. Our more than 50,000 associates consistently rate us highly as an employer, leading to 22 consecutive years on FORTUNE's “Best Companies to Work For” list.

At the same time, I was acutely aware of the fact that we are on the verge of unprecedented change—and it's change that was already underway before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The investors we meet with are often looking for more than traditional financial advice; what they're seeking looks more like advice about holistic financial wellness. They're interested in a very human-centered approach that is quite different from the way financial advisors have traditionally worked.

What this all means is that the role of the financial advisor must evolve—and the value of their role has changed. Clients are placing even more value on having a personal relationship with their financial advisor than ever before. Fortunately, at Edward Jones, that's been our competitive advantage from day one. We've always put our relationships with our clients at the center of what we do. But other firms have started to see the value in it, and they're working hard to close that gap.

In addition to these pressures, there are other elements of change creating great impacts for us. Regulatory changes are rightfully requiring us to serve our clients and their best interest. The economics of our business model are also under pressure—the transaction of purchasing securities has become a commodity and is nearly a free good. Competitive forces have lowered the breakpoint at which clients can purchase certain products. These pressures have an impact on revenue and compensation. Perhaps your business and model are undergoing the same kind of metamorphosis.

With all these factors in play, it was clear that our firm was at an inflection point. To me, it also meant that the conditions were ideal for transformation, and for putting conditions in place for our firm that would allow us to continuously improve over time. It's important in this context to recognize the difference between change and transformation. Change occurs in linear, predictable, and incremental ways—a change to a digitally enabled value proposition, for example. Transformation, on the other hand, is more vertical. It's often about multi-stakeholder (rather than single-stakeholder) impact, and it fundamentally impacts the purpose, culture, leadership, strategy, capabilities, and operating model of a company simultaneously. Transformation is riskier and more unpredictable than change.

Companies transform for one of two reasons. One, they're in a crisis; or two, because they get to—they see that the journey and the effort will be worth it, and they're excited by the possibilities. They recognize that transformational impact can improve not only the commercial enterprise, but also lives and possibilities. Edward Jones is firmly in the second camp. When you have a vision of the impact you want to have, you can either bring that vision down to fit your current reality or you can pull reality up to meet your vision as it was intended to be. Here again, we're in the latter group.

We're pulling reality up to our vision, and we're doing it from a position of strength. We began a change journey not as a discrete event with beginning and end points, but one that creates sustainable conditions for the firm to continuously improve and increase our impact over time—in fact, to quicken the pace of growth and innovation.

The Framework of Transformation

Every transformation must start somewhere—but it's not always easy to know where to start. We saw our initial challenge as identifying the future state we wanted for our firm, and the key competitive advantage that would endure through and beyond our transformation. As we began the work, we considered our purpose, culture, leadership, and capabilities, which helped us identify the gaps between where we were and where we aspired to be. We asked ourselves how we could future-proof our firm.

This exercise was, and is, a deeply human endeavor. We were considering the transformation of a beloved and impactful enterprise, one that tens of thousands of associates and millions of clients take very personally. Our mindset, our relationships, and the ways in which we collectively agreed to lead into the future, became fundamental to the work we were doing.

I believed strongly—and still do—that having a strong organizational purpose is the key to unlocking that organization's human potential. It provides a framework that everything else can be built upon. A worthy purpose unleashes the human spirit. It galvanizes people, and that's critically important, because the “how” of transforming from one thing to something else is hard. In fact, it flies right in the face of a deep human desire—to get good at something and stay good at it by relying on the things that helped you get good at it in the first place.

For a transformation to be successful, it needs to be purpose-driven, leader-led, and team-based. Those may sound like abstract or lofty words, but they become tangible and actionable when you put them to work in a large organization with a long history of working a certain way.

In our case, having some outside perspective proved to be very helpful—and confidence-boosting. We began working with Richard Hawkes and his team at Growth River to help us clarify the approach we wanted to align around in our multiyear journey. The Growth River Operating System, and in particular the Seven Crucial Conversations, are all built upon a specific way of thinking about teams and organizations, a unique model for understanding businesses, and a particular perspective on how organizations grow and innovate in a team-based way. Richard and his team helped us understand these foundational concepts, which helped set the stage for our journey.

It's also important to note that the Growth River team helped us develop a common vernacular that's proven very helpful in how we approach situations. I've likened it to the language of accounting—everyone knows what a debit or credit is, for example, and we agree on what we're talking about when we use those words. I can't stress enough how important it is to establish a common language around transformation—it makes it easier for us to have meaningful conversations and ensure that we consistently understand each other.

In our case, we've developed a dialect that's unique to Edward Jones. It's connected to our culture and rooted in terminology we've used for a long time. We have added a language associated with a common understanding of how a high-performing team works in concert.

With this language in place, we can have conversations that build more trust with one another and can deeply engage on topics that are critical to our transformation. The language and behaviors of a high-performing team are not intended to make things easy—they exist to make challenging work more productive while unleashing the spirit of the terrifically talented people you have on your team. Richard's team helped us recognize the importance and power of our language and helped us establish a baseline for it. From there, it has become uniquely ours.

An Organization-Wide Approach

Growth River also helped us unlock the full potential of teams within our organization. The theory behind it is simple: we're able to do much more as a team than we can individually. Companies are not machines. They are social systems made up of individuals who themselves have a purpose and thirst to succeed and have impact. High-performing organizations are comprised of constellations of high-performing teams.

Teams are high-performing when they bring together all the necessary perspectives—in other words, the necessary elements to form a system of roles that enable a team to be in it together—to achieve the purpose of the enterprise, the business, and every person on the team. I've learned to never underestimate the power that this concept of role definition can provide in terms of clarity and focus. Defined roles unlock the human potential within teams and then across teams, ultimately lifting the entire organization.

Our leaders and associates lean into this philosophy, advocating for a particular set of priorities that are critical for our future success. They take ownership of that perspective because they know it will ultimately create the impact on our clients, colleagues, and communities that we want to have.

It's an approach that works because we are organized around a shared purpose. That purpose is to partner for positive impact to improve the lives of our clients and colleagues, and together, better our communities and society. It's a purpose that guides everything we do. Every decision is made, and every action is done, through the lens of our purpose. It's our “why.” It reinforces the notion that our firm does not exist only to help people build wealth. We're more than that. We help people achieve things they might never have otherwise thought possible. We help them connect to their own purpose and bring it to life. Our purpose is the wellspring of our culture, leadership, business strategy, capabilities approach, and operating model. It demands that there be a logical connection among all those dimensions of our approach to growth and innovation.

For us to be able to serve our purpose throughout our second century in business as well as we did during our first, we must transform. Our purpose demands it.

It's equally important that our transformation be leader-led. Our leaders need to live and champion the mindsets needed for our transformation to succeed—their habits of thought and action need to always be in alignment with our goals and our desire to fulfill our purpose. But you don't just “tell” someone about this. Living it out, together, through shared experiences and a journey of discovery and learning, unleashes an ardor for the future that inspires leaders to engage others as they navigate the uncertainty of changing and learning. It's challenging, but it's worth it—the opportunity cost of not changing, of not adapting to the forces impacting our industry and our business, is too high.

How We're Transforming

As we build on our history and pivot toward the future, the conditions are right for our transformational journey. And we're once again working to stay ahead of the conditions of the stakeholders we seek to serve—the changing needs of investors, a new regulatory environment and pricing and competition pressures, the demands of talented associates, and the needs of our communities in order to be places where people can thrive.

Choosing not to change in our circumstances is also a fixed-mindset approach—and we're choosing to take a growth-mindset approach. That's critical to creating future innovation, staying relevant, and enhancing value to our clients, colleagues, and communities.

Exploring approaches like Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking has proven useful to us in our transformation, as these concepts have helped us recognize what vertical change might look like at the level of processes and operations. In that respect, they really can be quite powerful. The Seven Crucial Conversations referenced in this book, however, are designed to enact vertical change at the level of the social system itself. Resolving constraints at the social-system level is a unique and powerful type of transformation accelerator—the kind that has the potential to move an entire enterprise forward.

Perhaps the hardest part in any transformation is knowing where to start. It can feel like a daunting task, especially for a large, complex organization. It's too easy to start with the “whats” of change—what systems, what process, what talent, what technology. Importantly, Richard and the Growth River team helped us identify a strong starting point—with leadership and with culture, where a deeper understanding of and alignment around the need for transformation must take root and be shared. As Richard himself describes it, “Leadership and cultural agility are the launchpad for all successful transformational change journeys.”

Once that learning culture is well established, then an organization and its leaders are able to move onto clarifying roles and identifying the capabilities the organization needs to develop—or not. Only at this stage can leaders begin the work of connecting the right people with the right work and giving them clear accountabilities and responsibilities.

From there, the transformation can progress to establishing strategies and building the right customer experience—which in turn accelerates the organization's ability to activate the operating system of developing, selling, and delivering its product or service within the context of the company's unique competitive advantage.

On paper, this all sounds straightforward, doesn't it? But believe me, in practice, it's not. The work of getting through this progression is the messy middle that requires equal parts IQ and EQ—knowledge and empathy—for the transformation to succeed. It also helps to have a good dose of stubborn determination to journey on through the learning.

In our case, we made significant changes to the structure and style of our leadership. We moved from a top-down directive leadership style to a distributed leadership approach in which we've spread decision-making out across a number of groups—seeking to put decisions closest to where value is created. This approach creates a team-based way of working that's supported by functional areas and is fueled by distributed intelligence and innovation.

Specifically, the most fundamental change we've made is to alter our leadership structure. Previously, we had two committees, an Executive Committee and a Management Committee, through which every major decision was funneled. Now we have a series of forums, each with their own clear roles. This revised structure allows us to move decision-making closer to those who are directly responsible for the work, and ultimately closer to our branch teams and clients.

In this new format, leadership is distributed; each forum comprises a group of leaders responsible for solving the complex challenges we face as an organization. And because different people are responsible for different aspects of our complexity, we have to trust each other. And we do. In that way, team-based leadership is clearly a journey into the interior of each leader, and the alignment of each of those humans to the worthy ambition of the entire enterprise.

Within these forums, the job of leadership is to create alignment—which is not the same as creating agreement. Alignment requires that all participants in the adaptive social system choose to move in the direction of growth. The key is being adaptive and always pointing to growth and innovation—not stagnating around yesterday's value, but discerning tomorrow's value and organizing to create it in sustainable ways that are fit for market.

The key for us will be to ensure that everyone in the Edward Jones organization—all 50,000 of our associates, including me—is going full-out in their role. Transformation is hard; it takes all of us pulling in the same direction. None of us has the luxury of sitting back and allowing “others” to do the heavy lifting. Each of us gets to be an active participant.

That approach is one that must take root at the senior leadership level first, and from there, it can make its way through the entire organization. Our leaders set the example and actively help others develop the mindsets and behaviors we all need to orient ourselves and enhance our ability to live out our shared purpose. We are the “lid” on our organization's success and growth. Whatever becomes available to us in our learning journey and our relationships becomes available to everyone else. It's how we lift the lid and enable our organization to achieve more. (The opposite is also true—if we can't build healthy, productive interdependencies among us in leadership, no one else should be expected to either.)

Growth River's Valuable Contribution

As we've embarked on our transformational journey, the Growth River team has played a fundamental role in the work we've done. I often refer to them as our Sherpas on our path to becoming a high-performing organization. That's because, while they guide us and provide much-needed expertise and perspective, the work is still ours to lead and to own. Richard and his team have consulted with us, but they have also deeply engaged with our teams, offering feedback and truly being in it with us.

Growth River's core tenet, that teams and organizations can achieve so much more than individuals can on their own, is one we fully believe in. The people of Edward Jones create more positive impact for our clients, colleagues, and communities when we're all pulling in the same direction. The Seven Crucial Conversations help us work in a social system and help us move with more agility and confidence as we continue to transform over time.

I consider Richard to be more than a consultant; he's a friend and a fellow traveler on the road to make businesses more useful to all our stakeholders. I'm honored that he asked me to share my thoughts about his approach. I hope his ideas are helpful to you as you consider your own steps toward transformation and work toward unleashing the potential of your organization—and of your greatest asset, your people—to benefit your own clients, colleagues, community, and society.

Enjoy the book!

Penny