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,
We are at a gridlock in our firm due to the relationship between the two founders. We have to determine if it makes sense to make a couple of adds to staff in key support roles. The founders recently had a falling out over a personal issue that I cannot share without my entire firm reading this note and knowing what firm is being referenced. It is sufficient to say the issue was very serious. One partner was badly burned while the other considers it a non-event. As a result, they have gone into their respective offices and refused to come out when the other partner is in the office. It’s a very tense situation.
We still have a firm to run. We have had two open requisitions for a couple of months, for client servicing and a very high-level executive assistant. Interviews have been conducted and the market is very tight. It has taken us a long time to identify a final set of three candidates for each role. Historically when we narrow down candidates for a role, the founders and the two other partners meet with the people as a team. They have an organized set of questions they ask. Then, just like the papal conclave in Rome, they send up the smoke signal to tell us who they have selected. It’s always worked fine because we all narrow down the final three. We are happy with whomever gets selected, and they have a choice in the matter.
What do we do now that we have two grown men, the founders, who won’t even be in the same room together? Do we tell our candidates the approach will be different (we always share the entire process from the outset? They’ve been told for many weeks the final step is this meeting with the Fearsome Four.) Do we delay these very important hires even though it has taken us months to get to this place? Do we tell our founders to suck it up and run the risk something will happen in front of the candidates? We don’t have an official HR person. A couple of my colleagues and I who typically spearhead the hiring process are trying to figure this out. One of the four has been on vacation, so we’ve had a reason to delay but we can’t hold out indefinitely.
E.Y.
Dear E.Y.,
I have been writing this column for many years, and it is always heartening when I receive a perplexing question that I’ve not confronted before. The nice thing about working with human behavior concerns is that we always find a way to put up new and challenging obstacles!
I have encountered similar scenarios with several family-owned advisory firms I work with, and with an institutional client where the four partners had a falling out over a personal situation. They didn’t meet or speak to one another for many years until I got involved. I am familiar with the dynamics you are facing. Unfortunately, logic, negotiation or using a rational approach to appeal to their professionalism is likely not going to serve you well. They are both hurt and emotional and trying to show them the error of their ways will not likely work here. It’s unfortunate, but when people are reacting emotionally, they often can’t overrule their responses and put them aside in favor of the business or a logical outcome.
Recraft the way you do these final candidate interviews for now. I know some people reading this might say I am indulging bad behavior and cow-towing to people who don’t deserve such fair treatment. But this is based on many decades of studying human behavior and trying to find solutions to different scenarios. This is a sensitive topic, and you must work around it, not make it more explosive.
Set up a system whereby you split the Fearsome Four into the Temperate Two and you bring the candidates in to meet with two people at a time. You keep the same questions each person always asks, but instead of, for example, a one-hour meeting with four, do two 30-minute meetings with two at a time. Position this with the candidate that it feels less overwhelming to them (it will) and that you are finding you can have better engagement with fewer people (you will). Then, you or one of your colleagues spearheading this effort could collect the input from each of the people and then communicate the candidate who was chosen by all four or the one who got the most votes.
Is this an optimal solution? Of course not. The best solution is for these two founders to see their emotional responses are having a negative impact on the firm in a variety of ways and creating a difficult situation all around. But until they are ready, they are not going to come around on this basis. Your best bet is a workaround. On a side note, you might find this approach works better. I realize it requires more scheduling and the candidate is moving from one set of discussions to another, but it could also yield you benefits as I outlined above.
Dear Bev,
How does one appeal to an irrational, ego-centric and bullying senior partner who is irascible on a good day and outright mean on a bad one?
He bullies team members, the other partners and most of our vendors. In a call this week with an attorney who is crafting documents for a large client of ours (the client was not on the call), he literally exploded, yelling at the guy because one of the documents had not been completed. In fairness to the attorney, he had a death in his family and had communicated to us that he was behind in completing the process as a result (it’s not like he wasn’t working on it). I reminded this partner after the meeting that the attorney had dealt with a death and the response was, “And how is that my problem? We have to get our clients what they need.”
I’m not making this up. He is one of the meanest SOBs I have ever encountered. I have made it a point to just ignore him in the seven years I have been here. But now, because I am one of the only people who deals with him well (by ignoring him), I am being asked to join him on calls and in meetings. This isn’t my style and I cringe by association. I don’t want to leave this firm. I otherwise enjoy my job and I want to figure out a way to work with this advisor. But I can’t condone this behavior and I don’t want to be associated with it. Are there strategies for helping someone to see how offensive they are to others in a way that helps them change their style?
P.S. – I don’t want you to use my real initials so please go by F.A. which stands for Frustrated Advisor.
F.A.
Dear F.A.,
How do I respond to you in a way that is both helpful and honest? I am curious about the age of the advisor in question. I’m going to guess he is not young and has probably been doing this for a very long time and is likely very successful. One of the problems you run into, if this is the case, and I face it in my firm on a regular basis, is that it is very hard to have someone see the error of their ways when by all outside definition they are highly “successful.” If he has been at this a long time, clients respond positively to him and he is making a very, very good living, why in the world would he consider shifting his style? I confront this when I try and show advisors in coaching they might try a different approach to engage more effectively. Unfortunately, if this person doesn’t see and own that his behavior is off-putting, he isn’t going to be incented to change it one bit.
The other issue you face is that if no one else has confronted him in the past, and everyone has chosen the tack of ignoring him and avoiding him (such as you have done for seven years), and now you bring up his behavior as a problem, he is likely to see you as the issue – not his behavior. I call this “nailing Jell-o to the wall.” You try and confront something, but the person then makes you the problem for raising an issue and trying to address it. It can turn very quickly, and you find yourself in a defensive mode.
You have a few options here, none of which are likely going to be ones you will embrace with joy and excitement. But I’ll lay them out:
- You can be the “good” person on his team whereby people like the lawyer you referenced, and others you will deal with will quickly find out he is difficult and that you are the nicer person in the equation. They will then more often follow up with only you, ask you the questions they need answered and work more directly with you to avoid him. They might never mention his behavior, but they will choose dealing with you over dealing with him. I have seen this dynamic play out dozens of times and it isn’t a terrible solution as long as he doesn’t turn on you and make your life more difficult. Many times, the irascible advisor likes this because he doesn’t have to deal with those he finds annoying more than necessary.
- You could take a “maybe it is me….” approach with him and say that the last meeting you were in together, with the attorney, was concerning to you. “Maybe it is me, but I interpreted the way you were treating the attorney as being overly unkind and unfair. I know you thought you were championing the needs of our client, but it seems unnecessarily negative. Did you notice this or see this at all?” Then you need to stop talking and see how he responds. He will either get defensive, and disagree with you completely, or he will repeat his view that he was acting on behalf of the client. He might accuse you of being overly sensitive and mistaking his perspective. You must be prepared if you choose option #2 that it might feel insulting to you.
- You could seek out someone in the firm who is on the level of this advisor (same age, same tenure, same experience) and with whom this difficult advisor has a relationship whereby he respects their opinion. If you know the person well enough, you could possibly talk with them about what you observe and ask for any insights on how to address this behavior with him. I’m going to guess others have identified the problems his approach can cause and have possibly brought it up to him in the past but maybe they have new ideas or could coach you on how to address it.
There are limited ways to deal with this and these are the best ones I can give you. It’s a tough situation and you may find you either have to turn down invitations to be included in his meetings, or just deal with this and hate every minute of 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.
Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 