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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 Bev,
I find strong communication skills to be sorely lacking in our next generation of leaders. My consistent refrain is “Pick up the phone!” if you need an answer, or to get something resolved. It isn’t effective to send a lengthy email and then simply wait for a response.
This wouldn’t be bad if it was just internal communications — the problem arises when clients are involved in the interaction. We have some elderly clients who probably don’t check email but once a month. I’ll follow up with one of my junior people, call her “Julie,” who tells me, “I’m waiting for their response.”
Sometimes this is time-sensitive information: We had a client last week with a child buying a home, and the client wanted some information on how much they might be able to gift their child to help out. I asked my junior person to follow up and find out when we could talk to review things with the client, because there were few options. I got busy and moved on to other things.
When I realized this client wasn’t on my calendar, I asked Julie for a status. She said, “Oh, they never responded to the email.” These people are in their late 70s. I have no idea how often they are looking at email, but neglecting to make a call and find out directly when they could meet makes no sense to me.
The client could have missed the opportunity to help their child, and consequently be very unhappy with us right now. Things like this matter.
Julie didn’t even seem to notice or care this could have been a fiasco. (One day after I asked her, the client called me to ask when we could meet because he hadn’t heard anything from us.) How do you instill urgency, strong communication skills and a sense of accountability to get answers for clients in this generation?
K.P.
Dear K.P.,
This is a question I get often. Yesterday, I was doing a virtual women’s forum for a client, and one of the participants also asked how to instill accountability and urgency in this next generation. Lately, it seems to come up no matter the topic I am sharing.
I’ll tell you what I told this group yesterday and my regular refrain on this topic: You have to set expectations and offer guidance if you want to get different results. Remember, this is a generation that largely grew up not speaking to other people and definitely not calling anyone.
Most of them don’t even have a voicemail box set up on their phones, because none of them leave messages. In their experience, if you see someone called, you are automatically supposed to call them back. Many came of age during COVID, when schooling was online and no one was out socializing. Phone calls and conversations with others haven’t been as much of a focus for this younger generation.
That said, anyone who is client-facing has to understand their audience. Just as I am asking you to reflect on their history and experiences, you need to remind Julie and her colleagues of the same generation that clients in their late 70s are likely not on email regularly. If there is no response in X time frame, they need to place a phone call.
I like to say the companion approach is best — send the email, then follow up right away with the phone call. This way, you are ensuring you implement the approach that matters to a client. Personally, you would never get a hold of me if you called me. I spend almost the entire day on screen and on the phone. However, if you email or text me, you will get an almost instantaneous response — and I did not grow up with technology. You can’t generalize by age, so you need to give both options and let the client choose which one works for them.
If an email that requires an answer is sent and the client hasn’t responded, it’s also possible it went into the spam or junk folders. It should be a best practice in your firm to place a call if there is no response within a given time frame. This brings me to the importance of shifting behavior, which requires you to do three things:
- Set clear expectations for best practices and ground rules regarding how the firm operates with clients.
- See this as a mentoring and coaching opportunity. In fairness, Julie and her colleagues may have never been told, or ever learned, how to think about this differently.
- Catch the behavior, and ask for a re-direction. Don’t expect Julie to “get it” — help her get it.
Dear Bev,
We have a very productive young person working on our operations team. I say “productive,” because in any given day, she gets more done for clients than the whole team put together. She isn’t from the business. She worked retail for many years in a clothing store, and she is a hustler. Clients love her, because she gets right back to them and has the answers they need.
The problem is her mouth. She swears a lot. I get this generation is different and swear words aren’t as negative as they were when I was in my 20s almost 30 years ago. However, this is extreme. She speaks like this with her coworkers, and one of them told me they overheard her telling a client about our custodian and using very colorful language to describe how difficult they had been to deal with.
I don’t know what I am allowed to say now in the workplace. Will it be offensive if I tell her that we have standards for communication and she needs to watch herself? Or do I just make sure she isn’t engaged directly with clients and stays more behind the scenes?
E.C.
Dear E.C.,
Admittedly, the changing times we live in make it hard for any of us to know what’s okay to address and what’s not. However, I feel confident that it is fine in the workplace to address professional communication and client expectations. If I had a team member who used filler words a lot — the “ums” and “ahs” in communication — I’d certainly speak to them about how it diminishes their effectiveness in getting a point across. In that vein, of course I would address swearing and speaking in colorful language to also say this diminishes the point someone is trying to make, and can also be very offensive to the listener.
As I said to the earlier reader in this column, if many of your clients are older, they didn’t grow up accepting crass language in the workplace their whole lives. It’s important, no matter what communication approach you are using, to know your audience. Coach your team member on considering who is on the other side of the exchange and how they might feel or interpret a communication they are not used to.
You also might want to get this person a coach. If she is an effective contributor to the team, and just needs direction on how best to get her ideas across, a third party who focuses on communication and professional presence could be helpful. Your custodian might be able to recommend someone or, if you work with any asset management firms, they may have relationships like this they can extend to their valued RIA clients.
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, 2025 and 2026. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching Executive MBA students Leadership and Managing 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.
