How Personal Can I Get with Clients?

Dear A.S.,

Why would you consider this to be a “gender thing?” You mention you have a moderate relationship with the wife and you were asking about their personal plans for what they want to do with their money in retirement. You could have considered whether you have built enough trust with this woman, and probably her husband too, to earn the right to ask what they might consider to be personal questions. It sounds like your relationship has primarily been built on their investment portfolio, so this inquiry might have seemed like it was coming out of left field and made her suspicious about your intentions for asking the question.

In addition, the topic of what to do in retirement might be a touchy one for this person. Perhaps she doesn’t really want to retire. Maybe she and her spouse disagree about what they want to do in retirement. Possibly she felt put on the spot about a topic she wasn’t ready to discuss.

When you have worked with someone and have mostly stuck to facts and data about their situation, it can be an unnatural transition to start being more chummy and friendly. You have to build the relationship, so that asking deeper, more personal questions is a natural extension.

While our industry focuses keenly on preparing for retirement (as it should), the process of retiring is about much more than just having enough money. It can be a very emotional time for many people who associate their own value and self-worth with their work. Thinking about retirement isn’t the beach and the boat; it is trying to figure out what to do with yourself every day when there is no workplace. Some couples have more problems in retirement – they can get along fine when each one has a workplace and they can separate. But all of a sudden they have lots of time to spend together and if the relationship isn’t solid, this transition becomes threatening.

While these things may apply to your client, be sensitive that this could be a very emotional consideration for her. I don’t know how much time she and/or her husband have until retirement, but you might have inadvertently hit a nerve.

If you don’t know them well enough and haven’t spent the time to get to know them, you might hit a nerve without realizing it.

I know your intent was not negative, but words are powerful and if you don’t know your audience and aren’t sure of their viewpoint, tread very lightly on potentially explosive topics.

Dear Bev,

I have been reading a number of books on improving team dynamics – things like having people work together more effectively, instilling communication across a team and so on. I’m challenged by the fact that my two best advisors (very young people) dislike one another a great deal and their dislike spills over onto other advisors on our team. The support staff also takes sides because they each spend time politicking their supporters. I am not willing to fire either one. They are both very good at what they do. No matter how many books I read or ideas I get, nothing seems to work.

Are some people naturally contentious and you have to learn to live with it even if it impacts the firm’s ability to do good business?

P.O.

Dear P.O.,

The easy answer to your question is “yes,” some people are more contentious than others. But more often there is some underlying issue that is leading to their contentiousness!

There are pressures these two advisors are facing within the firm. Instead of finding ways to collaborate together, they are turning on one another as the problem. Once this happens, every single thing one advisor does will be perceived as negative by the other. It becomes a snowball effect where the “filter” they have on the person is about what’s wrong – so they identify only those things. I wrote a bestselling book about this topic. To learn more, or ask each of these advisors to read some excerpts, go here.

In the meantime, find a way to lessen the impact on others. One strategy is to instill a ground rule within the firm – if anyone walks into another colleague’s office/cubicle to talk about one of the advisors, the person they went to speak to must immediately pick up the phone and call that advisor in to have a three-way conversation. This ground rule often ends the gossip, talk-behind-the-back syndrome pretty quickly.

Another ground rule is that any negative talk about others in the firm has to take place outside of the office. I call this the “dinner table ground rule.” You can go home and talk to your significant other or roommate about your colleague in a negative fashion, but once you cross the threshold of the firm, no negative talk is allowed (unless you are trying to resolve a situation with the person directly).

These approaches won’t make the problem go away and these two advisors like each other. It just means you will minimize the negative impact on others in the office from their behavior.

Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Entrepreneurship. 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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