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 need to motivate my team to take more action. I often tell them to bring me solutions, not just problems. But all I hear are complaints about what we need to do differently. As the leader of our advisory firm this smacks of saying “you fix it.” The problems are not all mine and I don’t always have the right answers. Is there a way to motivate people to act instead of just talk and complain?
L.L.
Dear L.L.,
There are likely a few root causes to the problem you are raising here. Is your team empowered to solve their own problems? I work with many leaders who are frustrated their staff doesn’t “do more” to fix things. But upon investigation of the inner workings of the firm, I find staff is actually stymied in implementing new ideas. There is a penalty for doing something that doesn’t work, or trying to fix something without all of the tools required to do so.
Make sure that when you tell your team to find the solution they have the wherewithal to actually follow through.
Next, are you open to hearing what’s wrong and why they believe these things to be problems? I will never forget many years ago holding a strategy session with a number of advisors in a firm, and completing what we called “the obstacles session” where we allowed people to vent about what’s in the way of their success Then we categorized those obstacles into what they can control, what they can influence and what’s out of their control. At the end of the session we had a working list to tackle to help the advisors find solutions. But the important learning for me was when they unanimously told me the most valuable part was just the opportunity to voice their concerns and have someone listen to them.
It’s in the best interest of leaders to hear what their team sees as problems, and to understand what they are up against. It definitely does not mean the leader has to be the solver and fixer of everything, but it means the leader has to be open minded enough to listen and coach their team on how to find a good solution to overcoming the obstacles.
Next, are your actions sending mixed messages? Many times a leader is in charge because they are the person who likes to take charge. Leaders can face an inner struggle – they want to fix things and just get it done, but they become frustrated believing that everything sits on their shoulders and no one else will take responsibility. Watch your approach. If you are a direct, no-nonsense, get-it-done individual you may be sending your team the message that you actually want to be in charge and responsible for fixing everything. You might believe you want them to be more proactive, but your actions may belie your words.
If you truly want others to step up and take charge, you have to consciously be willing to step back and allow them to do so.
Lastly, do you adequately coach your team members on how to find and implement solutions? It’s likely your staff doesn’t know all of the inner workings of your practice the way you do. What they may perceive as a problem, or a solution, may not be accurate for a variety of reasons. If you want them to be more proactive, take the time to train and coach them on how to effectively do so.
It isn’t as easy as “bring me a solution” in most cases – I encourage you to examine the dynamics and see what areas you could improve in order to get better results from your staff.
Dear Bev,
We just finished our third offsite in as many years on strategic initiatives. We are a relatively small advisory firm, 17 people in total, and every time we come back from one of these sessions we have enough work for 50+ people to complete. How do we tell our partners enough is enough and we can’t keep piling on new ideas without completing the things already on the plate?
T.K.
Dear T.K.,
Before you attended the most recent offsite, did you remind your partners about the events of the past years? Did anyone revisit the findings and the next steps that had come out of those sessions that remained unresolved? In this year’s session, did attendees get around to developing an action plan for the agreements that were made – who, what, when, how, and how much for each of the steps? When the decisions were being made, did team members bring up some of the things on the current plate and talk about priorities that might need to be rearranged?
If you have some history – the previous two years for example– that the discussions at the offsite proved to futile, it would have been beneficial to be proactive about trying to make sure this year’s offsite was a different experience.
I find that often team members are expecting something different will miraculously happen without any effort on their part. Or they leave everything up to the leaders expecting them to “fix it” and make it more effective. But everyone who attended played a part in the outcome. It’s not unreasonable to think someone could have “called the audible” to point out the problems with implementation in the past and – in a non-combative way – asked for strategies to make sure the decisions made this year were done differently.
History repeats itself and that’s a good thing because it means we know what we are likely to get. Knowing what we are likely to get gives us the chance to take a different path or set up for success differently.
Next year, be sure you head this off early on so you aren’t dealing with it after the decisions have been made. For this year, I encourage you to create that action plan – be clear on specifically what needs to be done, and what it will take to do it. Assign names, timelines and other specifics and if you can show it is entirely unrealistic to believe completing everything is possible once you look at the information in black and white, schedule a session with your partners to go through it all and discuss what’s reasonable and what’s not.
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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