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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Readers,
I have a client — a reasonably large firm — that never seems to put a plan in place when making a decision. They have great ideas and expect people to “work it out.” Unfortunately, this literally never works.
People might do what is needed, but they are often not productive in their approach. They become overly frustrated without a clear set of steps, timelines, measurements and direction. Who, what, when, how, and how much must be sorted out before a project or change process begins.
This week, one of the team members was talking about the stress and anxiety from trying to make things happen without any support regarding how to get there. This person is in their mid-20s, so they’re not a seasoned professional. However, they were not given direction or clarity and were left to figure it out alone.
It reminded me, again, of the importance of knowing where you are going and having a clear plan of action to get there. In addition to having the project plan in place, helping a team to work together most effectively also matters. The leader should be the one to guide this.
There are a number of considerations to put in place before you start any change effort, transition or project. These can help save endless hours of wasted time trying to undo things that didn’t work or going back to fix it again.
1. I’ve said this many times, but it can never be said enough: Always start with the end in mind. Identify what success looks like from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. How will you know whether you are making progress or when you have reached the end goal, if you don’t have clarity about what the end goal or its timeline entails? Taking the time — as a leadership team or with the entire team — to map this out and communicate it is critically important.
2. Chunk what needs to be done to make progress toward the goal. In my conversation this week, there was a transition happening. A client of the advisory firm was closing out one strategy and moving to another. The team was given a list of people to call, but with little direction about expectations. Once the overall goal is set (step #1), it’s important to identify the smaller milestones within the overall goal. What should happen with the first week, month or quarter?
How will you know if you are on or off track? What will be communicated to ensure everyone who engaged knows what is working and what’s not? This doesn’t have to be a complicated software-based project plan. It could be the team sitting around to define what has to happen in order to make progress toward the end goal that has been identified.
3. Identify who should be involved and what their roles should be. This sounds pretty obvious, but in this week, as in most cases I’ve observed when there isn’t a good plan, a number of bodies were thrown at the project without clarity about (a) who the project leader would be, (b) how the team was supposed to communicate and engage with one another, © alignment of skills to what was required for the project and (d) identifying a senior leader who could be the go-to person for questions. People end up wasting their time when they don’t know “who is doing what with whom, when, how and why?”
4. Identify and raise the known and expected obstacles. Putting a plan in place without considering what might get in the way is an exercise in futility; the things that get in the way, which you haven’t planned for, will trip you up every time.
The person I was talking to was told, “You’ll just need to figure it out. We’ve all done that in our careers.” This isn’t great advice because, if the obstacles are out of the person’s control or they need to influence others to help overcome the obstacles, they would need a senior person to intervene. It’s folly to think everyone has problem-solving skills and everyone has the tools and resources necessary to do what’s needed. Help your team identify what they might encounter in advance and guide them as to how to systematically remove the obstacles.
5. Have a communication process up, down, and across all team members. It’s probably the most common thing that breaks down. The team looks to the leader to give updates, the leader assumes the team members are speaking and collaborating, and the people below often have no idea what the status is or what’s expected of them. Establishing clear guidelines for communication before you even start the project works best.
6. Ensure the team on the project knows how to work as a team. When I taught my graduate class called Managing Teams, I would often spend the first few classes just helping the students to see the importance of coalescing as a team before you start a project (or any endeavor) together.
Your team should know who will take the lead, who will be the notetaker, who will be the scheduler, who will redirect the team when things are off track, what communication tool everyone uses, what the strengths are of the different team members and so on. These things, when identified at the outset, make for a much smoother team experience throughout the life cycle of the project.
7. And when leading a project, remember Bruce Tuckman’s Five Stages of Team Development. As the leader, you should help guide the team to understand what stage they are at and the implications for working together. It’s the stuff considered to be “soft” that derails a project every single time. Don’t ignore 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. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. 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.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
