Team Culture: How do we manage variety of views in our investment team?
/At Banyantree we do not take lightly the responsibility of advising clients or making investment decisions that will impact the financial well-being of our clients. We follow a thorough process of research and deliberations when formulating each and every investment decision. The team seeks to make fewer but high-quality investment decisions rather than make lots of decisions that perhaps don’t receive due thought and consideration.
When you have an investment team with diverse backgrounds such as ours, combining investment management and multiple-industry experiences, it is natural there will be varying perspectives and sometimes disagreements. We find disagreements to be healthy and a check on each other’s blind spots. The team culture encourages open discussion and thoughtful disagreements. The ongoing success of our investment team relies on us to recruit people who disagree with us and who are smart. We make a genuine effort to understand each other’s point of view. The team members have to be able to disagree, with sound reasoning.
“Talent wins games, but teamwork wins championships.”
At Banyantree the spirit of independence cuts deep into our team’s culture, we cherish having independent thinkers in our team. The success of the team takes priority over individual triumphs. Why? In the long term, the success of the team benefits individual employees through personal and professional growth. The key to healthy team culture and dynamic stems from understanding our own strengths and weaknesses. The stability of the team ensures that over-time we have developed a good sense of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and use individual strains of strengths across the team in thoughtful ways to succeed as a team.
At the core of Banyantree's team culture is the desire to have meaningful relationships amongst ourselves, which extends to clients, and thereby do meaningful work. The relationship part is just as important as the work part. Relationships are built from embracing profound truth and profound transparency. By profound truth, we mean we can talk about whatever weaknesses we have as individuals and bring these to the surface without feeling threatened or embarrassed. And profound transparency allows everybody in the team to openly part-take in decision making and validate that there is no spin behind purported values of the team.
Our model of profound truth and transparency works well within our team and is key to our team’s success in having worked together for a number of years.
