
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 Readers,
Many thanks to those who joined us last week for the webinar on Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Clients. Whenever I get questions on how to handle someone who is difficult, or what to do when a client (or employee) is unreasonable, I focus first on the differences in style.
Our behavioral styles have so much to do with how we communicate and interact with others. Understanding the power of behavioral styles reminds us that communication is so much more than the words we use. If you have ever been in a disagreement or a difficult exchange and one person said, “But all I said was this….” And the other person responded, “Nope, that’s not all you said! Your body language said it all….” Then you understand the premise behind behavioral style.
Think about the fact that a difficult client might be one who is too headstrong, or not decisive enough, or too talkative, or not engaged enough, or one who takes too long to consider something or doesn’t think through things sufficiently. If you encapsulate one definition of “difficult” you will find it to be impossible. What is difficult to you might be easy to another advisor. You might like the headstrong person, while someone else is intimidated and gets a pit in their stomach when they have to deal with them.
Behavioral style is in everyone’s DNA – we can’t change it but we can learn more about it. We can observe our own tendencies, and understand where we connect well with others, and conversely what styles are a struggle for us.
Behavioral style has four components: the words we use, our tone, our pace and our body language. Unfortunately we focus a great deal on the words. We might practice a pitch, or hone our story, or write and rewrite a presentation. Words are a small part of what anyone takes away in a given communication. Some research says they are as little as 7%. The rest is coming from the delivery of those words – the pace, whether fast or slow, the tone we use and the body language associated with the delivery. If you are a fast talking, fast moving advisor, and you have a slow and steady client, you won’t be communicating as well if you only focus on the words in any given exchange. Matching pace, tone and body language can be an important way to opening communication more effectively.
In my webinar I talked about the importance of recognizing your own triggers. As an exercise, take a look at your difficult clients and see if you can recognize any themes. Is there some similarity among them? Is the thing that makes them difficult recurring throughout your interactions with them? When you can observe, objectively, what someone is doing and which behaviors make them difficult for you to deal with them, you can start to see patterns. These patterns can probably inform you about the kinds of people you enjoy communicating with and those who are a turnoff for you.
When dealing with someone who has a different style, and when experiencing the frustration that may come from it, most people dig their heels in deeper. You don’t like their style but rather than trying to modify and match, you entrench yourself in your own style even more. As you can imagine, this makes you stuck and unable to move forward effectively. Realizing that you are at an impasse is the first important step. The client is likely not going to shift, no matter how hard you try and show them the error of their ways, so you will need to try something different. As a start, try recognizing how the two of you interact together and what aspects of their behavior trigger you. Take an objective look at how you respond and ask yourself whether there might be a different approach you could use to match. Matching is not mimicking, it’s not repeating what they say, instead it is seeing the difference in approach and acknowledging it with a response rather than fighting against it.
Learning about behavioral style and communication differences is one of the most powerful things an advisor can do. It offers up more choice in dealing with a variety of different people.
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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