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,
Communication in our firm has come to a complete standstill.
We always functioned well by getting together in our big conference room, ordering in a few boxes of coffees and muffins and talking about what’s working and what’s not. Now all of our advisors are head-down trying to handle clients who are worried about planning for next year with an election pending. Our support staff is responding to client and advisor needs. There is no longer an exchange of ideas that germinates naturally.
I’m the COO of the firm and have been trying to reach out to each team member (17 of them) individually to make contact and just let them know I care. But there is no collaboration. Our president has the view of, “leave them be, they’ll come around when they have time.” But I don’t believe this is true. We benefitted from informal formality in our office and we need to figure out what this looks like now.
D.V.
Dear D.V.,
If communication weren’t hard enough before, add in the virtual experience, clients worried about changes coming with the end of the year looming and most people in our industry working longer hours with fewer breaks. Your term of “informal formality” is a good one – without structure, very little when it comes to communication evolves naturally, on a broad scale, within any firm large or small.
I am curious though – how do your employees think and feel about what’s going on? Do they miss the interaction or are they happy to have the time to focus on what they need to get done? The past experience you describe, in the office with coffee and muffins, might have been your approach. You might have gained good insights. But did the team see value in it?
I don’t know the answer. But consider what you and the team really need. Sometimes getting together for the sake of it is nice. People feel connected and they think about things they might not have otherwise talked about. But in terms of outcomes, it can be a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have experience.
That said, your employees might be missing the connection. In your one-on-ones, ask them open-ended questions so as not to direct them to the answer you want to have. Things such as:
- What’s working well with communication now amongst the entire team?
- What would you like to change about the current communication process?
- What are we missing that would be important to focus on right now?
- If you could be king/queen for a day, what would you change about the way we are all working together?
Some of the questions are different ways of asking the same thing, but they often yield different answers. If you incorporate this into each of the conversations you are having, you will start to see themes.
I’m not saying that over the long run it is good for any firm to have people working in silos and not coming together. You have to instill some rigor around this. But consider that there are times when legitimately there is a lot of work to do and people are head-down trying to get it done and unless there is a reason, or useful outcome, for the group gathering, many people will opt out to focus on what they need to do. Don’t put your assumptions on them, seek to understand their view and then decide the best way to proceed.
Dear Bev,
We launched a new website two months ago. I took on the role of marketer (even though it isn’t my area of expertise) for five partners/owners in our firm. It was a difficult process to get them to respond and of course they all had differences of opinion. We spent half a day arguing about the shade of blue that best complemented our logo and we never came to a conclusion. I had to make a final decision on my own.
Therein lies the problem. I ended up making a number of decisions because we could not gain consensus. Now, everyone, and I mean everyone, including the partners is looking at the site saying we should have done things differently. I spent about five months of my life focusing on this and had many days I was pulling my hair out trying to get decisions made. It makes me want to quit. Is there a more professional way I can say that I am done and not willing to invest more time making the changes they need?
H.A.
Dear H.A.,
You don’t share your role within the firm so I’m not sure of your level. I infer you are not one of the partners, but in a supporting role, so my comments are made assuming this.
There isn’t a lot you can do right now except to remind everyone of the process you went through, the time that has been spent, the history of the decisions that were made and then ask them whether they believe your spending more time and effort, and that of outside resources if you need them, is really worth it. Here is the secret about websites (or any marketing materials). When done well, they illustrate your story and encourage someone to learn more about you. But they don’t actually do the selling for you (at least in our business – online retailers have a different story). You want the site to show you are updated, have a good story and could serve the needs of whomever it is that comes looking. They can also be a great place for posting media, blogs, client portals and so on.
You need to consider whether what you now have, after five months of investment, is good enough. If it is, you could gently remind the partners of other responsibilities you have and ask them whether it is worth it to change fonts, colors and so on when you could be doing other contributing things that yield a higher ROI.
If, however, the final product does not tell your story well or is missing key aspects that would bolster your online presence in the market, then you might need to spend more of your time updating and changing what you have. Websites are never really done – they require constant care and feeding and the more informative things you can post on a regular basis, such as blogs or articles, the more relevant and interesting you stay.
So, either review it with an outside eye to see if you are truly missing things and consider what you need to do to upgrade and enhance, or push back reminding your partners of the time spent and the time now needed and ask them whether there is a justifiable ROI for you to continue to work on this. While you are frustrated, and I get that, you are likely getting paid to spend time on whatever is needed. Try to look at it as “paid learning” in order to keep your sanity.
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.
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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. 
