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.
