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,
Lately the markets have been concerning to many of our clients. Some of our funds have underperformed, although we tout our ability to “not lose as much when the market goes down.” But we’ve lost way more than the market has over the last few weeks in a few of our strategies.
Clients are here for more than these funds. My own client book is not suffering defections, but I’m hearing from some of our younger team members they are having a hard time telling a story that defends what we’re doing. I’m not sure it is our role to defend poor performance – our investment team makes decisions and some of those are better than others. But overall we give our clients a well-rounded wealth management experience.
I’m trying to teach the younger team members not to focus on performance and to engage in relationship building. But most every one of them comes from a finance background and gets stuck in the numbers. I was a psychologist in a prior life and came to financial work in my mid-40s, about 15 years ago. I don’t see the discussion as numbers based; I see it as behavioral and emotional. I am going to guess you will agree with me and you probably work with other people like my team members. How do I help them understand they are only hurting themselves sticking to this approach? As an aside I have not lost one dollar in assets during this time. My clients call and say, “You will let us know if there is anything we should know.” I believe my philosophy is proven to work but I can’t get others to listen to me.
M.T.
Dear M.T.,
“My philosophy is proven to work but I can’t get others to listen to me” could be the title of a book about my experience! I encounter your dilemma on a regular basis. In fairness to those who have traveled the finance route to get to this career, it is hard to understand and incorporate the emotional intelligence (EQ) or psychological component when this isn’t one’s background or training. A numbers person is going to look at the numbers, talk about the numbers and be connected to the numbers. You are absolutely right, it is a risky way to manage clients, because when the numbers don’t look so good, the emotional component comes to the forefront!
A few questions I’d ask you to think about as you try and appeal to your colleagues to listen and learn:
- Do they understand and can they tell your whole firm’s story? You mentioned your firm has a more robust offering than just the investments, but are your colleagues familiar with this story and can they tell it effectively too? I’ve often found that people default to what they know and they’ve been taught. Make sure they have been taught the story line so they can tell it effectively.
- Is the performance a key selling point for your firm? This is the difficult position many firms are finding themselves in. When performance was great, it was tempting (and easy) to sell on it, but when the market takes a dip (or two, or three or 10…) then it isn’t so appealing anymore and it becomes more about defending decisions and performance. Have a philosophy that you won’t sell only on performance no matter how great it is. Share the experience with your colleagues – younger team members probably haven’t seen the havoc a difficult market can wreak with clients. You can be a teacher.
- Have you approached colleagues in a non-threatening, non-ego centered way? Often when someone doesn’t listen, it is because we are delivering a message in a manner that shuts down their ability to hear us. I get your frustration and concern about not getting through, but I have to ask you to self-reflect and make sure you aren’t making it uncomfortable for them and off-putting. It is nice to be right and to have knowledge to share, but it’s always important to deliver the knowledge with an attitude of collaboration and concern.
- Have you offered to have a training session whereby you could walk through some of the best practices you are using with your clients and have an interactive discussion with team members so they can apply this to their own client situation? Sometimes a simple conversation isn’t enough; you need to help team members apply the concepts to their specific clients, practice with the dialogue and ask questions to engage. This is the difference between “tell me,” and, “help me learn.” Maybe you have been telling them, but you need to take the next step to help them apply this to their personal situations.
You are asking these people to make behavioral change and they have their own emotional responses to doing so. Keep this in mind as you try and teach them better ways of doing things. People who are excellent and patient with clients don’t always apply the same approach to their co-workers. I’m not saying this is the case for you, but asking you to consider whether you could take some different steps to help others learn.
Dear Bev,
Our ops team is getting more involved in talking directly to clients to help our advisors free up time to find new opportunities. We are a service team with back-office capabilities but not wired to think about how to approach a client and have a personal conversation. I don’t know how to shift this behavior and work with team members to teach them that spending time in conversation with a client IS doing their job. Most of the team (seven in all) believe they are not focused on what’s important, and not doing what they were hired to do.
I’m being measured on how much I can shift their behavior but I’m not a trainer so not sure what to do next.
D.A.
Dear D.A.,
You probably have a few things going on here with this effort. One is a behavioral aspect. Many people who are good at the back office are higher on the process and procedures scales and much lower on the people interaction scale. Many people who enjoy back-office roles get drained and depleted from too much people interaction and too much conversation. Be careful you aren’t asking people to do something they are not fundamentally wired to be able to do, taking them out of an important comfort zone where they do excel. When this happens, sometimes people aren’t as good at the areas where they previously excelled because they are spending so much time trying to shift their behavior into an area that isn’t their expertise!
Do they know what success looks like to make this shift? I get why your firm is doing it; you need to free up time for the advisor. But does your group know what exactly they are supposed to do? I’m thinking having general, get-to-know-you conversations are not all that is needed and maybe that isn’t the highest and best use for this team. I’d say the advisors were getting stuck in some service-related issues and then conversing with clients as a result. Your team could address these issues in a friendly and proactive way and probably accomplish the goal that has been set – to take the relationship interaction off the plate of the advisor.
Have there been any performance related metrics associated with this goal? These are people who work in an area with measurable performance – does this goal have quantitative and qualitative components so that team members know when they’ve achieved what they are being asked to do? And is there a reward for them doing so? It’s hard enough to change behavior but you are almost never going to be able to do it if you aren’t crystal clear about the goal, the measurements and the associated rewards that go along with it.
I’m sorry if these are all things that you are unable to influence. You might be in a situation where you are responsible to bring about this change, but not in control of making it. I am sensitive to this, but I have to be honest about your best steps to achieve success.
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. 
