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,
Year-end planning. We need to do it but in past years it hasn’t gone well. Everyone is checked out between end-of-the-year exhaustion, holidays and preparing clients for important year-end decisions. Wait until January and then it is full steam ahead on re-energizing for the New Year. No one wants to plan at that point, they want to jump in.
Best practices?
N.U.
Dear N.U.,
If the planning process was more enjoyable and the results were better, do you think your team would be less “checked out”? I find many team members groan when they hear “offsite” or “planning” because they know it will be a lot of time, typically without much direction and often leading nowhere. I’m not suggesting this is your situation. I respect people are exhausted and burnt out at year-end. I’ve had two planning calls today where advisors admittedly called themselves “distracted,” and I appreciate this. It’s always a tough time of the year and a mad scramble but the last couple of years particularly have been very wearing on people.
It is nice to head into the new year with a plan, having had a discussion about what’s worked and what hasn’t. I would not push something for December, as it is almost over. But you should time-block for January, so everyone knows when to plan for it. Have two to three sessions so you are not trying to cram everything in and exhaust people even more! Perhaps three 45-minute blocks of time over the first couple of weeks.
I’ll outline my proprietary SHIFT to Success® process. I’ve used this process with hundreds of teams, large and small, with great results. Having a roadmap and a process might help you to accomplish more and show team members you are serious about the planning and the outcome.
Before the first 45-minute meeting, ask them in advance to:
- Submit their desired outcome for the sessions. What will make the time together successful and worthwhile? Have them write this out and send to someone who can collect and collate them.
- Define what success looks like at the end of 2022 for them. If the team is high performing, meeting goals and having a good year, how will they measure it? Quantitative and qualitative.
- Outline the obstacles they perceived that made success harder than it needed to be in 2021.
In the first 45-minute meeting:
- Start by gathering the desired outcomes for the day. Determine what you are all driving for over the three sessions together and how you will define whether you have met the outcomes for the time spent.
- Collaborate on your group definition of success for the team and the firm. If you were all to high-five each other at the end of next year, what would you be celebrating? What markers would you use? Determine both quantitative and qualitative measurements.
- Identify the obstacles to success the team uncovered during 2021. What got in the way of everyone being as successful as they could be and wanted to be?
For the second 45-minute meeting:
- Make sure someone has taken clear notes and distributed them from the first session and the pre-work.
- In this session consider the human element. Does everyone believe the right people are in right roles? Discuss whether everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do and how the roles interact with one another. Is there any area of confusion or opportunity to clarify who is doing what, when and how?
For the last 45-minute meeting:
- Make sure there are clear notes about everything that has been discussed to date. Circulate these in advance and see if people have comments or questions before the session.
- Review what has been discussed and talk options and alternatives. Based on the desired outcome, the obstacles, the human factor and all of the discussions, what can this team do together to make 2022 a winning year? List options and brainstorm before you determine what is best.
- Discuss pros and cons of the different options together and decide on paths forward for everyone.
- Most importantly, create a working plan – we call this taking disciplined action. Assign the what, who, when, how much and next steps for each and everything you have decided to do.
- Assign accountability to someone to be project manager for each activity.
- Close the meeting by agreeing on check-in times and dates to be sure everything is on track and moving as you had expected and agreed.
Then, as the year progresses, find ways to check in and see what’s working and what’s not. Establish a monthly or quarterly review process to ascertain what you were hoping to do versus what’s being done.
The more the planning process is not just a situation where you talk about things and put it in a drawer for the remainder of the year, but rather is a living, breathing experience that everyone participants in, the more you will find your team members want to be part of it and care about it.
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 and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. 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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