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,
I work for a large investment firm and we are revamping our sales training. We have a full list of curriculum we want to train on but haven’t yet determined the order.
Where should we start? What is the number one most important area to focus on in 2015?
Nicolas N.
Dear Nicolas,
Your question is certainly a broad one! It’s hard to give a confident answer without knowing what you are doing now, what’s working and what’s not. Without the full context, I will give you a general answer. I think the best place to start with any good growth program is ensuring (a) that you have a solid story and (b) that your team can effectively tell the story.
Though it can be challenging to know how you compare to competitors and to clearly articulate why you are different so that your audience can understand, this is crucial to growth efforts. Even if you think your story is solid, I recommend starting here to affirm it and ensure that everyone on the team knows how to tell it well. Ask 5 different people to tell the story separately and then compare notes. Are the themes the same? Do they focus on similar things? What discrepancies exist? This can be eye opening.
I suggest starting here. Good luck with the efforts in the new year!
Dear Bev,
One of my team members is always hogging the limelight. She makes every meeting about her and her ideas. Eventually, we feel there is no point to bringing anything up; every conversation turns to how adept she is at working with clients. Is there a way to shut someone like this down so we can have productive conversations?
Sylvia R.
Dear Sylvia,
It’s funny how people who “hog the limelight” often don’t realize that they are pushing people away instead of impressing them. Many times the people who do this are insecure and seek validation and attention from others.
There are a couple things you could do:
Prepare an agenda in advance and assign people to each section. Circulate this so that everyone gets it and each person has a chance to share something. Agendas can be powerful to keep the team on track and focused.
Ask for time commitments. Say that you want to make the meetings more productive and so keep discussions (by everyone) to a certain time limit. Nicely tell her when her time is up.
Identify a specific topic you need resolution on by the end of the meeting, when she goes off track, remind her that you need to get to the resolution before the meeting is over.
Give her some validation – “That’s great. We would love to hear more about it but we can’t spend the time right now. Let’s catch up later.” This way you are acknowledging her need to share but not letting the meeting devolve.
By putting some structure in place and having ways to gently push her back to more general topics you will start to mitigate this behavior.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. In 2008 she co-founded Advisors Trusted Advisor to offer dedicated practice management resources to advisors, planners and wealth managers. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Leadership & Social Responsibility. 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.
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