Take Well-Timed Action for the Biggest Impact

Dear Frustrated Advisor,

The short answer is, no, this is not happening everywhere. However, certainly in many of the organizations I work with, especially the larger ones, cultural changes happen as a result of different leadership coming into the roles. I teach leadership and management at the graduate level, and it always pains me to hear of experiences like yours. I tell my 20- and 30-something students that they are the future and the next generation of leaders. As such, they have a real responsibility to get it right and implement good practices on behalf of their team members. What you are describing is in complete opposition to everything we talk about in class.

I’m not sure what the resistance might be to accepting your help or that of others in your firm. In fairness, there are always two sides to any experience. It’s possible there are things happening that your younger leadership is privy to and you are not that prevents them from engaging you and asking you for support and direction. They also may not know how to ask for support.

Sometimes people newer to leadership roles think they might look weak if they ask for help. It’s an admission they don’t know exactly what they are doing and they need to turn to others. We know this isn’t true, but I find a lot of newer managers feel this way. They could also have plans in mind that they are slowly implementing and haven’t finalized everything they need to do.

That’s the positive, glass half-full side of me talking. The half-empty side notices when someone describes their workplace as the Twilight Zone, and that they’re being told “do your job” and that their opinion isn’t needed. Meanwhile, you are watching clients and team members become increasingly unhappy. Those are all leading indicators that things are likely not going to get better.

Should you leave? I cannot answer that, of course, but I’m always an advocate of putting feelers out and seeing what options you might have. I’m going to assume, like most advisors in our business, you have signed some sort of non-compete and/or non-solicit. If that’s the case, you first need to know what your options are from a legal perspective. Even if you cannot leave now or prefer not to, you could still learn more about what others are experiencing and how they might be dealing with similar situations.

Dear Bev,

I am a female advisor with four male colleagues. Three of my colleagues are great guys. I enjoy them, we collaborate well, and I often bring them in to my own client situations. However, the fourth told me “the problem with women is that they hear what they want to hear and not much else” when we were brainstorming about a female client of ours. She needs help with a number of areas but has been unwilling to take the necessary steps to address the issues. This has frustrated me too, of course, but I would never paint her in a certain light just because of her gender.

He said this in a larger meeting with a couple of our CSAs — who are also female. The comment was made, and then we moved on to other things about this client. I feel like I need to talk to him separately about how inappropriate this comment was, but my other three colleagues told me to leave it alone, because “it’s just his point of view.” However, if I don’t address it, aren’t I abdicating my responsibility to the women on our team?

L.H.

Dear L.H.,

My goodness, it sounds like your colleague might not be operating at a very high level of self-awareness to completely miss the audience he was speaking to when he made a broad statement like this. The problem is that often times people who say things that are offensive will turn things around on you, as the person bringing up the issue, if you do try to confront them. In this case, he could easily turn these statements around to show how sensitive the women on the team must be to have taken umbrage with what he said.

I’m not someone who believes you should let offensive things go by, but I think it would have been better to have confronted him over this comment while everyone was still sitting in the meeting. Even if you had moved on to other things, I would probably have stopped and suggested no one in leadership should make a statement about what “women in general” do (or men either, for that matter, if that had come up)! Perhaps if you had pointed it out at the time, the CSAs would have heard you advocating for them and he might have been able to see it was offensive.

I think at this point, with time having passed, he will have the chance to say “That’s not what I said,” or “Why are you bringing this up now?” Although I am a fan of feedback, and addressing things that are difficult, I’m not sure you are going to gain much by calling him out on it this far past the event. Perhaps you can remain alert for the next time he says something along these lines. You could use that opening to say it is the second time you’ve heard him do this and you want him to know it isn’t really respectful to your client, or to women in general. Look for your opportunity. People who say things like this in group settings are likely to do it again at some point, so I believe you will get your chance to address it. Just be ready!

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. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She 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.

A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: To learn more about this and other topics, check out some of our webcasts.

Read more articles by Beverly Flaxington