Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
We want to do a teambuilding activity for our advisory firm. We get along reasonably well, but we are always passing one another in the hallways on our way to our next meeting or phone call. I run the firm, and I’d really like to get everyone engaged in an activity that would be fun but also meaningful. Do you have any ideas?
Curt P.
Dear Curt,
I commend you for thinking about this. The best time to consider teambuilding is when you want to strengthen the ties that bind your employees together, and not — necessarily — when there’s something wrong. There are two main types of teambuilding. One is pure fun; it’s just about engagement. For this type of teambuilding, you could volunteer at a local charity or hire a consultant who works with teams to build bicycles from scratch. There are also outdoors activities such as bungee jumping and rock climbing if you have reasonably athletic advisors.
The other type of teambuilding is what I would refer to as “teambuilding with a purpose,” and it’s my preferred type. This is where you get your team in a room or outside of the office to talk about what success looks like to all of you. You can review what’s working and what’s not and talk about your alternatives for addressing some of your challenges. Ultimately you come up with solutions that everyone agrees to implement together. You can look at different communication styles, establish ground rules and find ways to engage on an ongoing basis instead of just leaving the teambuilding session and going back to passing each other the next day in the halls.
For this type of teambuilding, you want to use a structured approach with an agenda and then have the staff working together to problem-solve and come up with action plans. I’ve found that there are few things that solidify relationships better than working together in a productive way and coming up with actionable ideas to implement!
Dear Bev,
I’m in sales for a financial technology firm. I believe in the product we sell, and I enjoy working with my market very much, but the philosophy at the top of the house for our firm is completely inconsistent with my beliefs. I believe we should value marketing, provide support to the sales team and work in partnership with our prospects and clients. Our top management believes we should “sell at all costs” no matter who gets trampled on in the process. Honestly, the way they talk about our clients has eroded my personal trust. If management thinks this way about the people who pay our bills, what do they think about the employees? Can I influence change in a situation like this? If so, what can I do?
K.C.
Dear K.C.,
Let’s see – you have a culture that espouses treating prospects and clients badly, a management team that believes that sales at all costs is acceptable and employees who don’t trust the management given what they observe in treatment of clients every day. Unless you have some magical powers that you have not shared, I’m going to answer no. You cannot do much to influence change in a situation like this.
That said, you of course do not have to act in concert with the cultural mores. You can still choose, on a day-to-day basis, to do the right things for your clients and to make choices that are in their best interests (and still will result in sales). You always have the personal decision to accept or reject the beliefs.
Unfortunately, my best advice to you is to keep your eyes and ears open for a new opportunity. I’ve been doing this work for many decades, and I have learned that the top management values are going to dictate the reward system inside the culture. People who act like the leaders you describe in your note fundamentally don’t “care” about the impact on others. It’s similar to another familiar situation: when people start leaving an organization en masse because of poor treatment, the leaders responsible do not ask, “What are we doing wrong and what can we shift?” They say, “Good riddance – we don’t want people who don’t want to work here!”
Don’t compromise your ethics and value system. Make choices each day that you can feel good about when you go to bed at night, but realize that you will probably not be rewarded for your approach. In fact, you might even be punished for it at some point.
Cultural fit is a critical piece of our happiness in the workplace. You want to spend your 40+ hours a week working in a place that values what you believe in and that operates in a way that you can be proud to be associated with.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. In 2008, she co-founded Advisors Trusted Advisor to offer dedicated practice management resources to advisors, planners and wealth managers. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Leadership & Social Responsibility. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 
