For U.S. Money Reserve CEO Angela Roberts, effective leadership begins with placing a high priority on people.
Roberts, the only woman to lead a company in the precious metals sector, notes her pride in the company’s workforce, a diverse group of people who work together toward common goals. By placing an emphasis on excellence—including motivation, talent, and drive—Roberts says that her leadership team gets the right people into the right roles based on merit.
Fair treatment of all team members, Roberts notes, removes unnecessary anxiety and helps create an atmosphere in which employees can hone their talents and skills. In turn, employees who feel supported help provide a better customer experience.
An emphasis on employee development represents just one facet of Roberts’ multidimensional approach to corporate leadership, which she developed as she followed an unconventional career path that led to her CEO role.
Diverse Background Reveals Business Acumen
Personal circumstances led to Roberts leaving college before earning her degree; she married shortly after and had her first child. With her husband in school to become a golf pro, Roberts needed to work to help pay the bills.
Juggling multiple jobs in organizations as diverse as pharmacies, electrical companies, and a Jewish foundation, she immersed herself in learning from every role. As she gained experience, she also gained important knowledge about herself and learned that she had a knack for strategic business development, including mergers and acquisitions. She also began to appreciate her interest in and affinity for using data to build processes related to marketing and sales, customer service, and the entire customer experience.
Before joining U.S. Money Reserve, Roberts worked at KLA-Tencor, which used computational analytics and other advanced inspection tools for process control. There, she supervised strategic planning sessions, along with mergers and acquisitions.
She gained additional experience when she found a mentor in the company who also owned a Kobe beef ranch. He asked Roberts to oversee the process of having his ranch certified as hormone-free. As part of that task, Roberts created a process document that would later serve many other ranchers.
A Focus on Effective Leadership
Roberts’ recipe for effective leadership includes her focus on creating an atmosphere in which team members can thrive—and that starts with education.
The field of precious metals is “incredibly vast,” she says, and the industry changes constantly as it reacts to conditions around the globe. U.S. Money Reserve provides training opportunities for team members, including a focus on the products and trends that may impact the industry overall. By enabling employees to participate in personal and professional development, Roberts believes that the company ultimately reaps rewards. Confident employees make good decisions that benefit the organization as a whole, she notes.
Roberts’ leadership strategy also rests on a very different type of resource: data. By using data analytics effectively, she says, the organization can keep an edge over the competition through in-depth knowledge of its products, its customers, and the many complex data segments that both entail.
In previous roles, Roberts gained insight into how to use data to make decisions and, as a result, how to proceed intuitively as well. Ultimately, she understood how to use both key performance indicators and the business intuition that she gained over time for fast but strategically sound decisions.
Strong corporate governance and a customer-first approach also play vital roles for effective leadership, Roberts notes, adding that she considers herself a “hands-on CEO” who participates in the management of the entire organization. Through regular meetings to communicate both achievements and goals, Roberts works to ensure that all team members in the company share the same vision.
Roberts emphasizes the importance of finding new methods for creating a better customer experience as team members internalize the organization’s shared values of respect, discipline, camaraderie, integrity, and perseverance.
Goals for 2020 and Beyond
Roberts notes that 2020 represents a good time for business leaders to assess what went right in 2019 and what improvements lie in store with the dawning of a new year and a new decade. Setting goals can offer insights to help clarify objectives and create milestones as leaders work toward success, Roberts says. She offers several essential leadership goals for 2020 and beyond.
First, she advises business leaders to challenge power structures in organizations and throughout the world. By observing power dynamics, she notes, leaders can determine their impact on organizations and employees.
To further support team members, leaders should take steps to encourage diversity and inclusion in the workplace, she adds. By creating a welcoming, creative, and comfortable environment, leaders can engage with team members from a variety of backgrounds to boost morale, solve problems, and enhance productivity.
Also, leaders should commit to working toward social good as a goal beginning in 2020, Roberts notes. Modern consumers offer their loyalty to companies that commit to acting in positive ways even as they provide outstanding goods and services, she says.
Finally, Roberts offers two more goals that focus on people: clear separation between personal and business life and a commitment to continual self-improvement. Connected tech, such as smartphones, has eroded the boundaries between work and home, Roberts notes, and leaders must set an example by purposely designating personal and family time outside work.
Meanwhile, Roberts adds that effective leaders must place a priority on continuing to learn and improve. By taking the initiative to read and engage in other educational opportunities, leaders gain insights that can benefit them in both their professional and personal lives.
About U.S. Money Reserve
For more than a decade, clients across the country have chosen U.S. Money Reserve as their preferred provider of exceptional gold, silver, and platinum coins. For a personal consultation, please contact U.S. Money Reserve.
