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,
I have a competent and expert team working with me. I have only hired from top-notch schools and those with experience. In terms of intelligence, I couldn’t ask for more but I believe the street smarts necessary for this work is missing for most of them. By street smarts, I mean the ability to encounter a problem and instead of raising it to me, as the senior partner, looking for a fix, being able to come up with a solution on their own. I have two staff members who actually have to leave the office when the markets don’t move our way and the clients call and give us heck for it. It’s part of the job to deal with frustrated and unhappy clients and these two have to “go out for coffee to decompress.” Is it one or the other? You get intelligence but you don’t get grit? Or you get a gritty doer but they don’t have the credentials I have been looking for? Can I teach them these skills at this point without just slapping them (proverbial) around?
D.W.
Dear D.W.,
Please no slapping! This has never been proven to be an effective behavior change method – with employees (or with children either, according to the research). I know you are kidding, but often times when people don’t do what we want them to do, we give them a verbal slap upside the head by belittling, insulting or pushing them to do things our own way. So be careful you don’t let your frustration level show.
I believe that problem-solving skills can be taught and managers can guide their teams to become better at dealing with blows and getting up, dusting off and going in for another round with confidence! The other good news is that research shows us that resilience can be taught. Even if they didn’t learn it in childhood, or at the Ivy League schools you hired them from, it isn’t too late for them to learn.
Some things you can do to guide your staff and help them hone both of these skills include:
- Be careful you don’t inadvertently take on whatever problem is given to you and just solve it. Hard charging, “get it done” folks can become frustrated when others around them don’t just do what needs to be done, but they don’t realize their own take charge style is getting in the way. You might want them to fix their own problems, but self-reflect and ask whether you jump in too quickly and just do it for them. If so, it can be easy to give things to you to handle.
- Ask questions more than you give advice. “Why do you think that client was so upset about this?” Don’t assume you know the issues and don’t jump to tell them your sage wisdom accumulated from years of experience. “Clients always call when the market fluctuates. Don’t worry about it.” These kind of common responses don’t allow the person to really thing about the situation and come up with their own ideas for responses.
- Take time to role-play. If a lot of the conflict is around interpersonal skills, perhaps practicing different responses and helping them revise their approach could help. You could play the client who just opened their statement to some negative returns and then call the advisor to yell about it. Help them handle it differently and not get defensive. Give them some of your ideas from your years of experience, but then let them practice in their own voice using their own words. Help them to consider why the client might be defensive or reactive. Sometimes getting into the other person’s shoes helps with normalizing the reaction.
- When they raise a problem to you, help them to consider what’s in their control and what’s out of their control. Most of the issues we encounter are within our control, but many people don’t realize this until you help them think it through. Send them away asking them to consider how they might exert their control or their influence differently.
This takes some patience and a realization that you are probably trying to shift behavior that has been developed over a lifetime. If you really want to teach them differently, keep at it.
Dear Bev,
What do you do when the leaders of your advisory firm fight like children? Bang doors. Call each other names. Insult one another in meetings. I’m serious. It’s embarrassing.
P.T.
Dear P.T.,
The best advice I can give you is to steer clear. Unless you are in an influential role and can pull these two advisors aside and explain how their behavior is impacting others in the firm without becoming a lightning rod, usually nothing good comes of trying to play mediator.
It’s possible at some point something will break and they will be forced to deal with it, or one of them will get tired of the dance they are in together and decide to shift. But until that time you probably don’t have a choice but to just let it play out. They are in the power positions and unfortunately can do what they want with one another. It’s a shame, but it happens more than you might think.
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. In 2016 her firm relaunched the Advisors Sales Academy. She is currently a Lecturer 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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