Lou Maiuri is Chairman and Group CEO of AssetMark, a leading wealth management platform for independent financial advisors.
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When I stepped into the group CEO role at AssetMark, I expected to find things that were broken. Instead, one of the clearest messages I heard from clients was simple: “Don’t mess with what’s working.”
I understood what they meant. The company had built something valuable: a client-centric culture grounded in integrity and strong relationships. People believed in the mission and in one another. That culture was not something I needed to replace. It was a business advantage I needed to protect.
But protecting a strong culture doesn’t mean preserving every process or habit that developed around it.
As an organization grows, the ways of working that once helped it succeed can begin to slow it down. Decisions take longer. Responsibilities become less clear. Communication passes through more layers. Accountability becomes harder to establish.
The leadership challenge is to improve how the organization operates while preserving the trust, shared purpose and relationships that made the culture strong in the first place.
Turn values into operating instructions.
Values should not simply describe a company. They should help run it.
It’s easy to define values. The harder work is making them useful. An employee should be able to translate a value into a decision: What standard should I hold? What does the client need from me? What am I accountable for?
When I joined the firm, “client success” was already one of our values. As part of our refresh, we made the language more active. “Client success” became “obsessing over client success.”
That change was intentional. We wanted client success to feel less like an outcome owned by one team and more like a responsibility shared across the organization. In practice, that means asking how each decision, handoff and interaction ultimately affects the advisor and the client.
Clear expectations reduce ambiguity and make accountability more meaningful because everyone understands the standard. By making values actionable, we ensured the strongest parts of our culture were clear and easy to put into practice.
Culture becomes operational when people can use it to guide how they decide, act and serve.
Hold the employee experience to the client standard.
What happens inside a company eventually reaches the client.
I see that connection in the thoughtfulness our people bring to their relationships with financial advisors. I have even heard from advisors who have embraced and adapted elements of our values in their own firms. That matters because the best evidence of culture is not what a company says about itself. It is what other people experience.
As a leader, my challenge is to raise the bar on clarity, accountability and performance while preserving the heart, collaboration and focus on excellence our clients depend on.
That starts inside the organization, with clear expectations, shared values and an environment where people feel accountable to one another and comfortable speaking up.
Teams that trust one another surface risk sooner, solve problems faster and spend less time navigating internal friction. That means less rework, fewer escalations and a better experience for our advisors and their clients.
Culture is not separate from performance. It shapes how the work gets done.
Make self-examination part of how you operate.
Even a strong organization needs the discipline to ask where its own habits are getting in the way.
Our company launched a future-of-work effort to examine how existing ways of working hindered performance as we modernized the workplace through smarter technology.
That effort helped inform several initiatives, including our values refresh, a stronger emphasis on continuous learning through “learn by doing” and explicit permission to experiment, as well as greater candor and open dialogue through our “Speak Up” program.
We did not try to fix everything at once. We focused on a manageable set of priorities.
The broader lesson is one I reference often: Do, learn, do. In practice, that means listening closely and deciding what matters most: Act. Learn from what happens. Adjust. Then do it again.
Large organizations can spend enormous amounts of energy cataloging problems. Leadership requires deciding which ones deserve the organization’s scarce time, talent and investment.
The question is not whether we can improve everything. It is whether we are improving what matters most.
The goal of self-examination is not to create more process. It is to identify where a small amount of structure can make the organization more effective.
Add scalable rigor without adding bureaucracy.
Since day one, my goal has been to preserve the entrepreneurial energy and strong relationships that make our culture distinct, while adding discipline around planning, communication, prioritization and decision-making.
Growth requires structure and operational rigor: clarity around outcomes, guardrails and ownership. With this in place, authority can move closer to those who understand the work best.
If every decision has to travel to the top, we have not created rigor. We have created dependence.
The CEO’s job is to make the organization’s direction and standards unmistakable, put capable people in positions to act and create an environment where accountability can thrive.
The goal is providing enough structure to protect speed, direct resources toward the right priorities and help the organization scale without adding unnecessary cost or slowing momentum.
High performance is a practice.
Culture can be an advantage. But it is not self-sustaining. Leaders must keep examining which practices reinforce the organization’s values, which create friction and which need to evolve as the business grows.
I do not believe leaders have to choose between humanity and high performance. The strongest organizations expect both: They care deeply about people and hold a high bar. They protect trust and insist on accountability. They preserve what makes the company special while having the courage to change what no longer serves it.
Do not change a strong culture simply to put your fingerprints on it. Make the values easier to live, the organization easier to operate and the standard of performance harder to misunderstand.
Preserve the heart. Remove the friction. Raise the bar. Then do it again.
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